CARING FOR MIGRANTS WITH JOHN WEBB TRANSCRIPT (051)

TODD KENT: Hello everyone, this is Todd Kent, Director of the Program in Teacher Preparation at Princeton University, and you are at the Point of Learning with my friend Peter Horn. I’ve known Pete since he graduated from Princeton in 1997, the same year I came to work here at Teacher Prep. Pete and I have collaborated on several projects over the years, from working on revisions to the Teacher Prep curriculum to co-authoring a paper on student voice for the American Educational Research Association. I’m excited to introduce this particular episode of the podcast because Pete will be talking with John Webb, with whom I worked closely when he led Teacher Prep from 2000 to 2010. John is one of the finest educators I’ve ever met. They’ll be talking about John’s new book about the heroic response of one Greek village to the global refugee crisis, which unfortunately remains a pertinent issue. And knowing these two amazing educators very well, I’m sure they will get into several other fascinating topics related to teaching, learning, and keeping kids at the center of the work.

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today’s show, Dr. John Webb, who founded a program over 50 years ago to care for the Haitian students in the school where he was teaching. Just like today, Haitians were not eating cats then either, but there was still backlash:

JOHN WEBB: People came to me and said that I was ruining the school, because all of these people were coming and it was “changing the culture of the school,” and there was “body odor in the school,” and that there was “social tension,” and that if I hadn't founded this program, they wouldn't have come.

[VO]: John talks about what he needed to learn about these kids in order to be an effective teacher:

JOHN: How had they been raised? How had they been educated? What language did they speak? How did they feel about all of that? How did they really feel in their culture? What were they experiencing? I needed to get inside of that “bubble” that surrounds, I think, each individual, and come to understand what's in there. Otherwise, I couldn't effectively teach.

[VO]: And he’s got a respectful rebuke for anyone who jumps to conclusions about migrants:

JOHN: you don't know who they are! You don't know anything about them! You don't know who they are, why they're here, what they've experienced to get here, what talents they might bring, nothing! And yet you are judging them based on some kind of immediate appearance and reaction that may emanate from inside of you. But it may also be part of the Trumpian style propaganda that you hear: it's an easy place to go when you don't know.

[VO]: All that, and a discussion of John’s new book about the global refugee crisis as encountered by one Greek village—coming right up!

[3:21]

[VO]: As regular listeners and supporters especially are aware, I take my sweet time crafting podcast episodes to ensure that they showcase interesting ideas and sound as good as I can make them sound. By design, these shows are more evergreen than time-bound, because I want them to be edifying in case you’re checking them out years later (subtle plug for the back catalog there) but I can’t resist the coincidence of producing this episode that deals to some extent with my guest’s direct experience with Haitian migrants in the 1970s during a news cycle here in mid-September 2024 that is still partially consumed by the Trump campaign’s embrace of the internet rumor that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio are eating household pets. Intended to stoke the anti-immigration rancor that Trump believes redounds to his benefit, this particular lie—and I feel completely comfortable calling it a lie, given recent reporting that J.D. Vance’s aides who contacted Springfield officials the morning of the debate were told that there was zero foundation for the Facebook rumor—this particular Trump lie has had real personal and educational impacts for Springfield residents, especially Haitian kids, who plead to understand why they are being treated so badly by their classmates and neighbors. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine reported at least 33 bomb threats as of last weekend, which shut down city and school buildings as well as public celebrations. State troopers have been deployed to guard students going to school. As of this recording, classes at Wittenberg University and Clark State College, both in Springfield, are online to try to keep students safe. (As usual, custodians and other essential workers are expected to report to their regular duties.) I want to get to the show I’ve been working on—slowly—for some weeks now, but I encourage you to listen carefully for the ways that John’s experience working with Haitians more than 50 years ago resonates with our current moment.

[5:28]

[VO]: I’ve wanted to record an episode with Dr. John Webb for a long time, because there’s no one outside of certain colleagues at the school where I taught for 18 years with whom I’ve had so many conversations about what matters in education. John and I met 24 years ago, when he invited me to speak at a new University-wide convocation honoring the Program in Teacher Preparation at Princeton, and we hit it off immediately! An educator possessed of a deeply humane approach to kids, John strives to know each student as an individual—and has taught several generations of teachers to do the same. He began his career as a teacher of French in Spring Valley, New York, a suburban community in Rockland County, about an hour north of New York City. He began teaching teachers during his years at Hunter College High School in Manhattan, where he also served as Chair of World Languages. Later he led Princeton’s Program in Teacher Preparation for 10 years, during which time he co-founded the Princeton University Preparatory Program, or PUPP, a summer institute for bright high school students from families with low income. (I can vouch for PUPP’s power as its proud literature teacher for three summers back in the aughts.) And now John has written a book set in the Greek town of Molyvos on the northwest corner of the island of Lesvos closest to Turkey, through which an estimated 400 to 450 thousand refugees and migrants passed during a 16-month period from November 2014 to March 2016, as they fled war and famine and oppression in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Palestine, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. After hundreds of hours of research and interviews, John has produced a deeply affecting book called Molyvos: A Greek Village’s Heroic Response to the Global Refugee Crisis, which personalizes and individualizes a humanitarian crisis that is usually too enormous to comprehend. He paints vivid pictures of the struggle to navigate the 4.1-mile expanse of the Aegean Sea separating this Greek hamlet from mainland Turkey, including the shoddy rubber crafts that were overloaded by smugglers, and the feeble outboard motors that were sometimes stolen by other profiteers before the desperate migrants reached the shore. His compelling narrative begins with a restaurant called The Captain’s Table, which became the unlikely epicenter of a massive relief effort that divided the town. Some community members pitched in immediately, but others refused, and some ignored the situation as much as they could. Anyone who cares about refugees, migrants, and immigration more broadly should read this book, which of course will be linked on the show page—but I was also very interested in exploring more with John his own experience in Spring Valley, in the early 1970s. There John, a relatively new teacher of French, found himself coordinating his school’s response to an influx of Haitian students, whose families were fleeing the tyrannical regime instituted by Haitian President Francois a.k.a. “Papa Doc” Duvalier, and his infamous undercover death squad, the Tonton Macoute. So there’s some of that, and plenty of talk about what I hold to be the center of effective teaching: the teacher-student relationship. John and I recorded this conversation in late March 2024 at his home in Cooperstown, New York, where he lives with his husband Nelson Mondaca, a retired Marine making a second act as an award-winning chef, and two gorgeous Golden Retrievers, Jersey and Dakota.

[9:18]

PETER: The book is called Molyvos: A Greek Village’s Heroic Response to the Global Refugee Crisis, and it documents the period between November 2014 and March 2016, when an estimated 400- to 450,000 migrants crossed the 4.1 miles of water between Turkey and the town of Molyvos on the northwest tip of Lesvos. One of the very helpful features of your book is the maps that you commissioned for it, so it's easy to see that this tiny town was certainly the closest Greek port from Turkey. You said that you wrote the book because it was a story that needed to be told. I'm here in your living room because I agree, but what's your connection to Molyvos, and how did you decide that you needed to write this book?

JOHN: Well, Nelson and I went to Molyvos for the first time in 2013 at the invitation of some friends, and we had an opportunity to really come to appreciate its beauty, the culture, the community, and the food, of course! So we had this affinity for it, and we met some very interesting people, not knowing at the time that these people were going to be the ones at the very epicenter of the refugee crisis. So in other words, for some reason, we felt a connection to them. We felt a closeness. We felt a warmth from them. And after the crisis had passed and we were visiting the next time in Molyvos, the very people who had befriended us the first time spent time sitting and talking with us about what had happened there. It was difficult to grasp it, because everything was peaceful; everything was quiet. And yet I could tell from the intensity of the conversation—both in terms of its content and in terms of its emotionality—that this was an event that had shaken the village to its very core, and that people like Melinda, whom we had come to know—

PETER: This is Melinda McRostie.

JOHN: Melinda McRostie.

PETER: She, with her husband, owned and operated this restaurant.

JOHN: That's right. They owned and operated The Captain's Table. They had been permanently impacted by this. And even though it was some three years later, Melinda grew emotional when she spoke about the events that had occurred. When she said to me that people turned against her for doing this, that people had blamed her for the crisis—that if she hadn't helped [the migrants], they wouldn't have come. That's what really struck me, because in Spring Valley, as the number of Haitian students began to increase in the school, and I had set up a program that would help to integrate them as well as provide them with instruction that would enable them to transition into the mainstream program, people came to me and said that I was ruining the school because all of these people were coming and it was “changing the culture of the school,” and there was “body odor in the school,” and that there was “social tension,” and that if I hadn't founded this program, they wouldn't have come.

PETER: Because this was Spring Valley, this was toward the start of your career.

JOHN: This was about 1971 or ‘72. My third year teaching.

PETER: So you were a few years in, and Haitian immigrants, who had been courted actually in the late ‘50s—that was the start of the Papa Doc Duvalier reign of terror in Haiti. But they had been courted by the nearby Ford plant, I believe—

JOHN: That's correct.

PETER: —to come and work. And so there was a little bit of a community of workers, but then when Haitians in large numbers needed to get out of Haiti, because there were people already in Spring Valley, they connected with other people in Spring Valley. So by the early ‘70s it started—I guess it was a decade of formidable influx in this area where you're teaching. And as a teacher of French, you found yourself connecting and working with a lot of these students and thereby kind of in between the Haitian community and some of the people there who were none too pleased about the changes going on.

JOHN: Yes.

PETER: And so in a similar way, you recognized that kind of either intransigence or hostility of the community as an echo in Greece of what you had faced just outside of New York City early on.

JOHN: And I recognized immediately what Melinda had gone and done in her effort to help the people feel respected and cared for, in the middle of tremendous trauma. And I was aware back in Spring Valley that these families—and many of my students—had seen people murdered in Haiti, or had disappeared and never come back. I remember one parent telling me about how the plane that they were on to fly to New York was unloaded and all of the luggage was placed on the tarmac, and each person had to identify their luggage because they suspected a specific enemy of the Duvalier government was on that flight. And indeed, they identified the person because he didn't have luggage, and they watched this person be taken away. And so even in what might appear to be a normal departure, there was terror. And then of course there was the whole issue of the Haitian “boat people.” And I had one student who had been put on a boat in the hands of a smuggler—a rowboat for all practical purposes—and headed for The Bahamas with this smuggler who was then supposed to hand him over to someone else in The Bahamas for the trip to Miami. And he came without a family! And of course, they were met by church groups or other people in Spring Valley who might have had an acquaintance with them from back in Haiti, but they were there almost as orphan children. Suddenly they were in my care because no one else seemed to know what to do with them. (And I think that that was an honest reaction.) And they honestly believed that being a French teacher, I would know what to do, which I didn't.

PETER: Because of the language.

JOHN: Because of the language. I didn't even know what Creole was!

PETER: But in terms of the people who were coming, they were just from all different strata of society who were trying to get out from Haiti?

JOHN: At that time, it was largely a professional crowd. It was very similar in that regard to the ones coming over from Syria and Afghanistan. They were an educated population. They held positions of serious professional responsibility. They were doctors and lawyers and scientists and nurses, and soldiers as well.

[VO]: Professionals not unlike the attorney Markenzy Lapointe, a Marine veteran who is now prosecuting Ryan Routh for the most recent Trump assassination attempt in the Southern District of Florida. Lapointe is the first Haitian-born U.S. citizen appointed to the office of U.S. Attorney.

JOHN: In other words, the population coming out of Haiti at that time and the population coming across to Molyvos were of similar socioeconomic strata.

PETER: What did you learn, or what did you take away from your experience with the Haitian refugees?

JOHN: What I took away had to do with pedagogy. I did not feel that as a teacher I could be truly effective in instructing period—but certainly in enabling a young person to integrate into another place and another culture and another language—if I didn't know about the students' experiences prior to meeting me. How had they been raised? How had they been educated? What language did they speak? How did they feel about all of that? How did they really feel in their culture? What were they experiencing? I needed to get inside of that “bubble” that surrounds, I think, each individual, and come to understand what's in there. Otherwise, I couldn't effectively teach. I couldn't provide any context for learning that would be meaningful if I didn't know these things about a child. And in fact, the parents as well: I needed to understand how they felt, how they viewed their children, how they viewed education, how they viewed school, how they viewed the learning process, what their hopes were for their children, what their fears were. And until I could understand that, there was no way that I could respond effectively to them either.

PETER: But then, it's something that you realized was a profound benefit for you as a teacher working with any student and any group of parents.

JOHN: Absolutely. All of a sudden, it was important for me to know that this kid didn't have breakfast because both of his parents worked in New York City and left the house before he even woke up. So there was nobody there to do anything for him, and there was nobody there when he got home. He was a latchkey kid, and that's why he was asleep in the morning in class. And so I would say to him, “Bring breakfast to class!” and he started to perk up! Or with the Cambodian children. Now that's another whole story, but there was this one little kid. He came from Cambodia. He was an orphan. He and his brother had been separated. His brother was somewhere in the South and he was in Rockland County in the care of a church group. And he was all eager, all ready to learn, an amazing young man. And then all of a sudden, about two months, three months, into his stay in the United States, things just stopped for him. He looked ashen, he was sad, he didn't do his work, he just completely fell apart. And I could communicate with him, and there was no one there who spoke Cambodian. And so it wasn't until the end of that school year when he had acquired enough English and he told me and his fellow students in class how he had gotten out of Cambodia: the story of the trip from his village to the seacoast where the landmines killed the elephants that they were traveling on, and he watched his grandparents die with a landmine. Ultimately, when they got to the coast, it was only him and his brother, and they had been separated when they left for the United States. And all of a sudden, this all hit him at one point, and we didn't know. And if we had known, we would have been able to—not necessarily lighten—well, maybe we would have lightened the burden, but we certainly could have provided more support for him and he wouldn't have had to suffer! So it existed in every range. Students with learning disabilities: if we figure out how they do learn—because they do have ways of learning … If we figure out how they learn, then we know how to teach. And so that's the solid pedagogical outcome of this whole experience.

[23:57]

PETER: It's fair to say that one way to describe your book is an extended meditation, with many painstakingly researched example,s on the question eloquently articulated by one of the writers about the crisis that you quote. Her name is Spyros Orfanos. And that is: How do we act as citizens of the world when another human being needs us? We're sitting here talking [in late March 2024], when immigration continues to loom large as one of the key issues of the 2024 election, just a few weeks after Donald Trump cowed his followers on Capitol Hill into killing the immigration legislation that Republican and democratic lawmakers had negotiated for months, because Trump believes chaos at the border is a political winner for him. I don't mean to sidetrack our conversation, but I found myself wishing as I read your book that anyone who cares about immigration would read it because I heartily endorse what someone said to you a few weeks ago: nobody who reads this book will think about immigration or migrants or refugees the same way. How much did the immigration debate in the U.S. inform either your approach to this book about the migration crisis in Greece, or your determination to finish the project once you had begun?

JOHN: I always thought about our southern border question in the same domain as I thought about the Haitian crisis because of the similarity that the Haitians were viewed as economic refugees, but that they could go home. Because they were considered economic refugees, it gave them less stature. And of course, that harks back to the whole “refugee” vs. “migrant” [designation].

PETER: Even though you have the Tonton Macoute slaughtering people?

JOHN: Exactly.

PETER: I just wasn't aware of this, that that was the classification …

JOHN: That's right. It really was. They were never classified as “refugees” and by all noremal standards—

PETER: Or “humanitarian refugees”—

JOHN: Because there is the United Nations definition of a refugee—

[VO]: According to the United Nations, a “refugee” is someone who has been forced to flee conflict or persecution and has crossed an international border to seek safety. They cannot return to their country without risking their life or freedoms. It is a legal term that carries with it certain formal protections. The term “migrant” does not have an international legal definition. However, it is commonly understood to refer to someone who has chosen to leave their home to start a new life in another country. A migrant can theoretically return home without risking their life or freedom.

JOHN: Certain conditions at home will determine whether people fleeing that a particular country qualify as refugees.

PETER: So for example, in the case of Greece, the Syrians were considered refugees.

JOHN: Yes. But maybe somebody just fleeing the Democratic Republic of Congo might not under a certain but the Syrians— And so some people did actually try to pass them off themselves off as Syrians if they weren't because they thought it might be easier to get [refugee status]. The United Nations had not declared anyone else to be refugees other than Syrians. And so the Afghans said, as did the Haitians, We’re fleeing from horrendous political turmoil where we're faced with death and hunger, but we don't have the same rights as the Syrians because the Syrians have been declared refugees. And that was true for the Sudanese and the people from the Republic of Congo and everything. And that was what was going on with the Haitians. And of course, the Haitians pointed to the Cubans, saying Cubans are considered refugees, and when they come into the United States, they are entitled to all of the rights of refugees under the Geneva Convention, but the Haitians weren't. So I saw it from that perspective, and I understood the migration that was taking place out of El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala to the United States. I had encountered undocumented people from those countries in New Jersey. I was aware of their situation there and had the same sentiments for them as I did for the Haitians. But my real connection to this issue occurred in relationship to the refugees coming into Greece, because it was so immediate. It was now. And I knew people who had stepped forward to help them as I had the refugees—or the people from Haiti. And so all of a sudden there was a personal connection to it. I knew Melinda, I knew what kind of a person she was. I knew what she did. I knew why she did it and all that. And so all of a sudden, I really became maybe once again acutely aware, or it may be that after all these years, I had yet a more enhanced awareness of it than I did back in my twenties when I was working with the Haitian population.

PETER: When I asked the question, I realized that it may be just overdetermined: that this is a story that you needed to tell, and you saw it and you wanted to make sure that it was documented. I guess the U.S. immigration question kept coming to my mind when I was reading it because it's uncanny, some of the kinds of similarities: that there people who kind of resisted helping out, and then when they finally did help out, they were like, Wait a second, these people aren't spreading disease. These people aren't terrorists. But they had these myths: The migrants are here spreading disease. They're “poisoning the blood,” if you will—popular expression now—or they’re terrorists. They were saying exactly the same thing. It was as if they had heard some of our propaganda, but it happens everywhere, of course. This is an old story, and the parallel struck me so many times, but it's only by working hand in hand and seeing people face to face that you've come to realize that, well, this isn't the case at all!

JOHN: Well, I was just going to say a person I have known for a long time and who taught in Spring Valley, for God's sake—she ended up living along the Texas border and she was just rabidly anti-immigrant because she says, “You see these people crossing that border and going down the street and they don't have anything and they're coming in by the hundreds, and what are we going to do with them?” And of course, I couldn't help but think to myself, Well, that's the viewpoint you have, but you don't know who they are. You don't know anything about them! You don't know who they are, why they're here, what they've experienced to get here, what talents they might bring, you know nothing! And yet you are judging them based on some kind of immediate appearance and that reaction may emanate from inside of you, but it may also be part of the Trumpian style propaganda that you hear: it's an easy place to go when you don't know. It is very easy to assume that these people have nothing, that they're troublemakers. And if someone helps to confirm that, well then it's harder to stop and say, Well, who are these people? And to try to find out who they are. When I was teaching multicultural education, and this was the theme, of course, that you had to get to know who your students were and the students would inevitably say, “Well, how do I get to know all that stuff?” And I said, “You start asking questions.”

PETER: Sorry, these are your students who are teachers in training, right? Pre-service teachers?

JOHN: These are actually classroom teachers, or well, actually these were graduate students. They were teachers who were already experiencing it in their classroom. And what used to strike me as strange is that it never dawned on them that you really had to get to know your students! It wasn't really included in early teacher education. Get to know your students! [Rather the approach was:] Know your subject material, and this is the way you teach it, and the problem is all solved. And so many of them would come back after a few weeks in class and say, “Oh my God! What I just found out about so and so.” And I said, “Well, you ask questions and you just keep asking questions.” And I said, “As long as you keep asking questions, you are A. going to find answers, and B. you're going to approach that individual differently.

[34:32]

PETER: Since we're on the subject, would you tell the story—I just think it's so important and I'd like to document it—of the teacher who said—it was a heritage language classroom, and she realized that her students knew Spanish, most of them, quite a bit better than not only she did, but probably ever could. And the kind of tension she faced at first because she was still trying to do what “teachers” do, which is to be the prime knowers in the classroom. And when she realized that she didn't in fact know more about Spanish language than these kids who had grown up speaking Spanish all over the world, I think, what she recognized and how that changed things for her?

JOHN: Oh my goodness, that kind of, and that she had the courage to own it!

PETER: That's what I'm saying. That part I just feel is such a—

JOHN: Absolutely, I learned—I think that interacting with her was also a turning point in my own professional makeup, because she actually had the courage to do what no teacher I had ever seen, or knew of, had ever had the courage to do. And that was to recognize that the chaos in the classroom was unmanageable, and she was able to pinpoint the cause. And the cause was her—not the students. And that she had to say to them, “Look, I don't know as much Spanish as you do. You know a lot more Spanish than I do.” She said, “I don't know anything about your country; you know everything about it. But there are some things that I do know how to do. There are things that I know about the language that you don't, but I also know ways in which to teach. So let's work together. You teach me, and I'll teach you.” Problem resolved, in so many ways, because she said what the students already knew.

PETER: And she gave them the opportunity to wear the mantle of expert.

JOHN: That's right.

PETER: To show their expertise and to be proud of that, and to have that validated by her willingness to learn from them.

JOHN: She gave them a reason to be proud and an opportunity to express pride in who they were, and it was miraculous.

[37:31]

VANA ZERVANOS: Hello, this is Vana Zervanos, Associate Dean of the Hobbes School of Business at St. Joseph's University. I met Pete two years ago when we were serving as inaugural fellows in Democratic and Civic Engagement at the University of Pennsylvania, a new collaboration between Penn's Netter Center and the Graduate School of Education. I think I was talking to Pete for about four minutes before he mentioned that he had a podcast. I thought, You're a confident white guy in your forties. Of course you have a podcast! But then I listened to an episode and was like, Wait, this is actually pretty good. As far as appearing in this particular show about a village on the island of Lesvos, well, you might guess with a handle like Vana Zervanos that I've got Greek heritage, and you'd be right about that. I spent many summers visiting my grandparents' home in Lamia, a small town on the mainland in the most beautiful country on the planet. After listening to Point of Learning, I made the choice to contribute a one-time donation, and you can too. Pete says I might think about making a second one-time donation, but let's see how this episode turns out, shall we? If you want to, please consider clicking the button on the show page. I will also be considering it myself. But for now, back to the show!

PETER: The triumph of the book for me is that how can you compass a number like 400,000 or 450,000? What does that mean? What does it look like? But you get into the stories of these people and the volunteers who worked with them and what they reported and how they were moved and what they stumbled on and what they learned. And it just humanizes and personalizes the whole thing. 

JOHN: Well, Ilektra Pasxouli, who was a volunteer with Melinda for a long time and ended up working with her at Oxy, she said there was no way that I could help—really help—all these people, but she said, “They needed water, they needed something to eat, they needed dry clothing.” She said, “I could provide that for them and I could show them kindness.” And she said, “I hope that as they progressed on wherever they were going, that they would remember that they had been shown this act of kindness and that maybe someday they'll be doctors and they'll be lawyers and they'll have a beautiful home. But for right now, that's what I could do. And that's what they needed at the time.”

PETER: Oxy is a good example because it's the name of a club a little bit away from town where Melinda was able—I think it was Melinda. She had a friend of a friend or something who owned the place and knew that it was only open the summer—

JOHN: Only open June to August.

PETER: And so it had this parking lot that was available. There were people in town complaining about, these refugees are all over the place. She said, Well, look, let's find a location. She worked out this location, and so Oxy is one of the locations that you write about, and some of the stories are set there, including her moxie in dealing with the UNHCR. (This is the Refugee Aid Agency of the UN.) They had provided buses, and so she decided that in order to get the refugees there, she would just use all the buses that the UNHCR had provided, do it all at one time, load everybody up and take them out there. And UNHCR said, Wait, those are our buses! She's like, Well, you're not doing anything with them. You just got here. You provided some buses. This is what needed to be done. So I made this call—

JOHN: And you're not helping me load them!

PETER: But the things that people figured out, so this isn't an education book per se, but there's so many accounts of things that people feel figured out or realized, moments of ingenuity, even the scheme that she came up with, for example, realizing that if she wrote numbers for people to try to figure out how to load the buses in an orderly fashion—if she just wrote numbers, some people who were desperate would figure it out and be like, Alright, I can write numbers. So they'd write numbers and then you'd realize, This isn't working. So she finally came up with a system of colors and symbols. I think that really helped because you're talking about dozens and dozens and dozens of people on given at any given hour that you're trying to move at a particular situation. So I love those little anecdotes. But then also there are very touching examples of people interacting with kids, especially. You've got one of the helpers that you write about a lot, a friend of yours who volunteered, Robin. She has a supply of watercolors that she starts with, I think, and Ute as well, does some art projects with kids. And there's some pictures of the artwork that they make, very tender kinds of connections and possibilities for creativity and creation amidst all this pain and dislocation and personal and external chaos. Speaking of the helpers, many of the people who talked to you had some strong thoughts about those who did eventually come in to help, whether they were affiliated with a non-governmental organization or NGO, like the UN Refugee Agency or the Red Cross. Some were more helpful helpers than others were, and some of course were unaffiliated, as I said. I wanted to highlight, especially at this moment, one of the NGOs that was actually very effective and had a consistent record for really excellent work, which was Isra-Aid. I think I'm saying that right?

JOHN: Isra-Aid. Yes.

PETER: Isra-Aid. It's an organization I hadn't heard of before. Palestinian Muslim and Israeli Jewish doctors worked alongside each other, and the Palestinians helped quite a bit by speaking Arabic, which many of the migrants spoke. And then you describe at one moment that there were some times that Muslim patients would be dumbfounded to learn that they were being treated by Jewish physicians. It led to a very interesting cultural moment.

JOHN: Eric [Kempson] loved it.

PETER: Yeah. I didn't know if you had anything else about the people who helped, the mixed motivations. I mean, there were some crazy stories of religious, I assume they were Christian religious groups, just the way they behaved—

JOHN: Who wanted to convert the heathen!

PETER: They would wade out into the water and give people Bibles before their dinghy—their not even seaworthy, slowly capsizing dinghy that was getting a motor stolen off the back by somebody who was trying to repurpose it! They would give them Bibles before they had even landed, or they would let them land and get hungry and be kissing the beach or looking for Mecca to pray. And rather than offer food or water or blankets, they would preach to them that that's what they were doing. Like crazy stories about some of the things that went on. And I guess there were turf battles in some places. People fought each other.

JOHN: Eric Kempson referred to them as the religious wars.

PETER: Yeah, there you go! If you had any reflections on the helpers—

JOHN: The animosity towards the large NGOs became huge, with the exception of Doctors Without Borders, Isra-Aid—

[VO]: I looked it up! The third very helpful organization was Proactive Open Arms, a Barcelona-based group that was one of the earliest Non-Governmental Organizations to arrive.

JOHN: And the people who were part of those organizations were the ones who came and they were the ones who helped, and they administered. They did everything. And that extent of engagement earned the respect of the people who had already been helping because they were coming in and doing what Eric and Melinda and her husband and all of the other volunteers who worked for the whole project and for Starfish, what they were doing.

PETER: And also they asked. It’s my impression that they asked, What have you been doing? And they sought to learn what had been doing, as opposed to coming in and making assumptions about what people needed or what should be done, and just taking control of the situation.

JOHN: Right, exactly. And with Melinda and Eric, when the volunteers would come, they got trained by Melinda and Eric, and part of it was to understand the culture of the area and what people had already been doing so that they would have a level of respect for what had been going on before they arrived. Whereas the large NGOs came in, and because of their size, their international stature, and their wealth, they just assumed that they could do anything they wanted, because of who they were! And they didn't ask permission to do anything. They drove their cars onto people's property. They took over areas that didn't belong to them. And people learned that within the large NGOs, there were the administrators, there were the paid staff, and then there were the people who actually did the work. And the people who actually did the work were volunteers for those organizations who weren't being paid. And the staff members drove big cars. They had, as I described in the book, they had meals in the restaurants in the port when there were refugees hanging around or they wanted to do a publicity video, and they would actually go out to the beach and try to get the refugees to pose during the unloading of the boat so that they could get good footage! Now, there were things that I didn't dare say in the book, stories that were told about American celebrities who went over there and they were all over the place. These American celebrities brought in by the large NGOs to be a part of the publicity that got shown on TV as being their response to this crisis, once the world found out about it. And so certainly after September and then in October, there were a lot of celebrities over there and doing films and all that sort of stuff. At one point—I know I tell it in the book—Eric had been down on the beach and he was coming up with a group of refugees who had landed, and he was coming up the steep incline. It got to the top of the rise, and there were some people standing there with clothing with the insignia of their NGO, and he said, “Why aren't you down on the beach helping? There are people down there who need help.” And their response was “That's not a part of our protocol.”

PETER: That's not our department!

JOHN: And so it was that attitude that caused the dissension. Melinda was always very cautious when she spoke about the NGOs, because she said, “We needed their money. We were desperate for the money that they had to offer us.” Eric Kempson was less enthusiastic, because he said these major NGOs, the UNHCR and others would arrive there, but their volunteers had no supplies. And so they would have to go to Eric and Philippa’s place and get supplies, and yet they were working for a huge NGO that had all kinds of resources!

[VO]: At the end of our conversation, we returned to parallels with U.S. immigration.

JOHN: Everything is a parallel! The crisis itself, the political reaction to it, and then ultimately the outcome. It's like my cousin's son, John, my godson, who's working for this mission in El Paso, and that's what he's doing. He's dealing with refugees coming across the border. He's the head of a mission in the city of El Paso. They deal with about 250 people a night coming in. And some of them stay for a period of time, but he said they all need clothing, they all need food, they all need some kind of medical attention, and most of all, they need someone to care for them a little bit. And so he's helping them get jobs under the table so they can make money to get to wherever they're going. And he drives them to where they need to go to get there. And he says, “For God's sake, let them in! Let them in.” Because they go and they find jobs and that's all they want to do, is they want to work and be safe! He says, “They're not going to cause trouble.” But of course it is part of the American dilemma in a sense that they felt that we had to create a common culture because there was the War of 1812, and we got seriously threatened. It was important to have the Common School. The Common School wasn't because it was for commoners; it was to create a common culture, one that we could be patriotic about because we figured that if we have something to be patriotic about, we'll defend ourselves. And then of course, the whole business about religious freedom, that we had come for religious freedom and everybody came here to worship God in the way in which they wanted to. And because they were able to do that, somehow, we were the favorite nation of the world. God liked us better than anybody else! And so all of a sudden we were welcoming the wretched wretches from your teeming shores—

PETER: I think it’s “wretched refuse.”

JOHN: It's even worse! Wretched refuse from your teeming shores. And so we were better than everybody else. And that is so embedded in who we are. It's what the whole “MAGA” all about. It goes back to that.

[53:12]

[VO]:Am I really going to close the interview with “MAGA” as one of the last words? Yes, because the history of a half-century ago has something to teach us about MAGA too. Make America Great Again is a slogan co-opted from Ronald Reagan, who used it twice in a speech 44 years ago, campaigning against Jimmy Carter on Labor Day, 1980. I have never been a fan of Reagan, but I was heartened to look up what he was talking about when he said it. Turns out, he was literally standing a few hundred yards from the Statue of Liberty as he spoke in Jersey City that day. Here’s just 90 seconds from the beginning of the speech. He doesn’t use the term “immigrant,” nor does he name the institution of slavery as one of the “different ways” people came to America, but listen to what he does say:

GOV. RONALD W. REAGAN: Through this "Golden Door," under the gaze of that "Mother of Exiles," has come millions of men and women, who first set foot on American soil right there, on Ellis Island, so close to the Statue of Liberty. These families came here to work. They came to build. Others came to America in different ways, from other lands, under different, and often harrowing conditions. But this place symbolizes what they all managed to build, no matter where they came from or how they came or how much they suffered. They helped to build that magnificent city across the river. They spread across the land building other cities and other towns and incredibly productive farms. They came to make America work. They didn’t ask what this country could do for them but what they could do to make this—this refuge the greatest home of freedom in history. They brought with them courage, ambition and the values of family, neighborhood, work, peace, and freedom. We all came from different lands but we share the same values, the same dream.

I’ve got a link to full audio, video, and transcript of the 18-minute  speech on the show page. Here’s one more sentence from the middle:
REAGAN: I want to help Americans of every race, creed, and heritage keep and build that sense of community which is at the heart of America …

[VO]: And the last 50 seconds, where the author of “make America great again” seems to place a very different value on immigration than the party of Trump.

REAGAN: … let us send, loud and clear, the message that this generation of Americans intends to keep that lamp shining. That this dream—that this dream, this last best hope of man on earth, this nation under God, shall not perish from the earth. We will instead carry on the building of an American economy that once again holds forth real opportunity for all. We shall continue to be a symbol of freedom and guardian of the eternal values that so inspired those who came to this port of entry. Let us pledge to each other, with this Great Lady looking on, that we can, and so help us God, we will make America great again. Thank you very much.

[56:53]

That’s it for today’s show! My great thanks to John Webb for providing some additional context for his excellent new book, Molyvos: A Greek Village’s Heroic Response to the Global Refugee Crisis, which you can order right from the show page. Thanks as always to Shayfer James for intro and outro musics. Credits for the interstitial Greek and Middle Eastern music sampled in this episode appear on the show page. Finally, thanks to you for listening, supporting, rating, and reviewing this show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you found it. If there’s even just one person you know who might enjoy this episode, please do share it with them. It will mean most coming from you. Point of Learning is written, recorded, edited, mixed, and mastered by me—gradually—here in Sunny Buffalo, New York. I’m Peter Horn, and I’ll be back at you as soon as I can with another new episode all about what and how and why we learn. See you then!

UNTIL THEY KNOW YOU CARE with GREG JACKSON TRANSCRIPT (050)

LILY FLAST: Hello, this is Lily Flast, founder of Soutien NYC, and you are at the Point of Learning with Peter Horn. Let me start from the beginning. I’m 14 years old, sitting in English class, having been handed my copy of The Odyssey. I was not feeling enthusiastic about reading a 500-page book, as you can imagine. But when Peter, or Mr. Horn in those days, began his dramatic reading, and from a standing position leaped onto the top of his desk, my dread became excitement. What do you get when you combine one of the greatest minds with one of the greatest hearts and an unbridled passion for learning? An educator and a leader who can win hearts and minds. So when Peter first shared that he was thinking of going out on his own as an education consultant in 2015, so he could share what he had figured out about what and how and why we learn with other schools, districts, colleges and universities, so he could influence the greatest number of leaders, teachers, and—most important to him—students possible, my response was a resounding YES! This podcast is part of that same project, so I'm excited to hear what happens in this special 50th episode of the Point of Learning podcast. Now, enjoy the show!

[01:33]

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today’s special 50th episode, a sneak preview of a new Point of Learning project on how to have respectful conversations.  

PETER [from clip of new civil discourse video]: Small examples of compromise matter, so kids today won't grow into the Congress of tomorrow that can't somehow compass compromise as an essential part of the messy, small-d democratic process.

[VO]: I speak with my producer and collaborator Greg Jackson about why he cares about this project. GREG JACKSON: After years of being in the confrontational talk show genre, I just felt like I wanted to go in a different direction. I felt like I wanted to add something to the culture that was more serious and helpful to people.

[VO]: And some of why I care about this project.

PETER [from interview with Greg]: You know, I think with the national conversation being where it is, one of the best moves we can make is to try to work on that next generation, or the people who are just about to enter into the conversation, which is to say high school students.

[VO]: All that and much more, coming right up!

[02:51]

[VO]: Welcome to Episode 50! I began thinking several months ago about what kind of special episode I should make for this fiftieth podcast installment—after only seven years! (Can you believe it?) Then in early spring 2024, I had a conversation with another education consultant who, like me, had started out as a classroom teacher. He mentioned in an offhand way that he doesn’t keep in touch with any of his former students; he has no idea what they’re up to. It was a small moment in our conversation, but I got to thinking about how fortunate I am that, for whatever set of reasons, former students—some of them just 5 years younger than me, because I began teaching high school seniors right after I graduated college—are now some of my best friends. Three of them are on the fairly short “favorites” list of my phone contacts (what we used to call “speed-dial”); I check in with a dozen or so more former students every year to catch up, or get some advice about something I could use help with; sometimes they ask me for advice. If you’ve been listening to this podcast a while, you’ve heard from a number of them: Kevin Johnson was featured in the pilot episode of this show in the spring of 2017, an episode that started out as a lesson from this professional engineer (and my very good friend) who was teaching me the basics of how to record and edit audio. Shayfer James, of course, starred in the most recent episode, and by his gracious permission, his music always inspirits the soundtrack here. Molly Colvin, Jessie Gregory, Josh Lerner, Gil Scott Chapman, Justin Rosin, and Michael Rosin have all contributed multiple music tracks over the years. Technically the last three were not actually my students, as in English students, but it’s amazing who will wander into your classroom to play during free periods if you keep a Yamaha baby grand in there, like I did! Dave Eisenberg has suggested numerous ideas. You heard his voice talents on the episode called Baby Unplugged, where I interviewed his wife Sophie Brickman about her fascinating book on the tech that is marketed to parents of kids age 0 to 5. Very important conversations about the form and content of this show have happened with Lily Flast and Keith Zemsky, both of whom you hear a little bit from on this episode, as well as with Raj Bhandari (who I’ve got to tap soon) and really, many other former students who ping me now and then with a thought they had about a show they’d just heard. What this moves me to focus on as a theme for this episode is a major throughline for my career as an educator, for my ideas about education, and for the Point of Learning project: it’s  relationship: First, as I’ve suggested, the teacher-student relationship, which I hold as central for effective teaching and learning—I’ve got a sweet dissertation on this topic if you want to read more, but let me just flag here two standout memories from my training as a pre-service teacher; both have to do with the teacher-student relationship. One was a veteran teacher explaining to us student teachers, “As a classroom teacher, you should be friendly, but you should not try to be your students’ friend.” I think this is very important advice, especially for new teachers, especially for young teachers, in that it helps to lay out appropriate boundaries. I want to be clear that although I have come to consider many former students friends, I was cautious to maintain professional boundaries when they were my students, and consulted regularly with counselors and administrators when I believed a student needed extra support. The second memory along these lines was a small plaque in one of the Teacher Prep seminar rooms that read students don’t care what you know until they know you care (so there’s the origin of today’s episode title). students don’t care what you know until they know you care. Now this is a sentiment worth suspecting immediately because of how catchy it is. It deploys the very pleasant rhetorical device called chiasmus, where the terms “care” and “know” cross back over each other in an A-B-B-A pattern, like JFK’s famous:

PRESIDENT KENNEDY [archival audio]: Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.

[VO]: Here the terms ”your country” and “you” trade places, which charges the sentence with extra music. If you were going to map this out, you might decide the pattern looks like an X, which the Ancient Greeks called chi, and so we have a term called chiasmus. (Did you think I was going to do a 50th special episode without nerding out on some etymology?) Anyway, the thing about this idea is that it not only sounds good, it’s true. My experience of 18 years in the classroom as well as my research reflect that students really don’t care what you know until they know you care. Many times the “care” is caring about them as an individual, as a whole person with ideas and curiosities and challenges that have nothing to do with your class or school. And sometimes the “care”  is caring deeply about your subject matter and your role as a teacher who is not a pompous ass or someone there just to hear themself talk or collect a paycheck. I confess I’m fired up about all this, but lest you think I’m just here to hear myself talk, I promise I’m about to bring in another voice, the voice of Greg Jackson, another former student who is now a dear friend and most definitely on my Favorites List of contacts. The owner of the company Action J Productions, Greg is also the producer of a video series spun off from this show called Point of Learning Master Class, which we hope to pitch to you as people who might help us find a larger audience for it. The subject of the first video for teachers that we polished this year is called “Respectful Conversations: How and Why to Practice Civil Discourse,” and it also, turns out, aligns with the topic of relationship. You can’t talk meaningfully with someone about hard topics if you’re not willing to enter into some kind of relationship, however temporary, based on mutual respect and trust. You can lecture them; you can scream; you can maintain that you’re right and they’re evil because they disagree with you about what should be done in Gaza, or because they’re thinking of voting for Trump. But you can’t learn anything that way, and you can’t grow from the experience. Very few people you talk to will risk changing their mind until they know you care (and vice versa). The research bears this out, and I want to underscore this point especially for fellow progressives, who tend to think that if we just present the right facts, we’ll win people over. Facts and data from vetted sources do not move most people who don’t already agree with you. Do you know what does? Relationship. If we are going to risk changing our mind, most of us most of the time experience a usually subconscious process that goes something like I believe this person cares about me, so maybe they have a point here. Maybe I’ll think about this differently. Think about some time that you’ve changed your mind. If there was a person who influenced you, I’ll bet this month’s PoL donations that you respected that person and believed they respected you. This is the other context I’m thinking of with the title “Until they know you care.” Now I don’t have to tell you that our national and international political conversations are especially combustible right now. We’re in a moment of unusual partisan animosity that flares up too often in other interactions between friends, neighbors, and family members. Many politicians and other influencers are willing to pour gas on the fire because they can get rich or get famous or get elected by doing so, but I’m hopeful that if we begin now with the students in our classrooms today, investing in their capacity to engage in respectful conversations, we’ll be able to begin finding creative solutions together. Aight. So I’m about to chat with Greg Jackson about the arc of his academic and professional life, providing a little context for how he and I came to collaborate on this new video series, and why we’d like you to help us if you agree that this project is important, and needs to reach more eyes and ears. We do have a call to action, in other words, which is different from most episodes of this show. So stick around, as I coax Greg out from behind his camera and editing suite to talk for a few minutes into a live mic. Okay, one last note before we get started: we tried a different workflow for recording this episode. Here’s a taste of me realizing what was going on when I didn’t have to think about it because we were experimenting—

[12:04]

GREG: I just got an alert saying that there's not enough room on your iPhone, so I'm gonna cut recording.

PETER: On my iPhone?

GREG: Yeah, I'm recording in 1080P, but—

PETER: You're recording to my iPhone?

GREG: Yes.

PETER: Really?

GREG: Yeah, I'm recording locally, and then the files are automatically uploaded to me.

PETER: Okay.

[12:24]

[VO]: Okay. Anyway, the sound quality in spots is a little different, but the content is strong enough that I'm proud to present it right now.

PETER: I had a good time talking with Shayfer James a few weeks back, and it occurs to me that I had you as a student at the very same time. But I had you twice, first for English III, beginning in the fall in ‘97. And then for English IV your senior year in the fall of ’98; you graduated in ‘99. Do you have thoughts, or recollections of that period in English?

GREG: Going into your class, I always looked forward to it. You know, the music going in was like a breath of fresh air. I felt like Okay, I can do this. I can relax. And I was just in a great state of mind.

PETER: Was there a song that you remember? Was there particular music?

GREG: “Sir Duke.” Okay, I'm walking in and the first thing I'm hearing is—

[MUSIC CLIP from start of “Sir Duke” by Stevie Wonder]

GREG: I had never heard “Sir Duke” before. Stevie Wonder. And I was just like, What is happening right now? This is amazing. And how have I not heard this? Like, I should have heard this by now. I had heard “Superstition,” but I'd never heard “Sir Duke.” and I was just like, Oh my god, what? And I'm in school? Is he allowed to play this stuff? I was just like, amazed. And then I don't remember how you tied it in, but there was a reason you were playing it. You don't just randomly pick songs; there's always a reason, a method. And you were always able to tie that stuff in. So I loved it. It was always, What is he going to play this time? And I just remember all of the music you exposed us to, and I loved how you did your worksheets—your assignments, or how you were going to do your curriculum or whatever, the lesson for that day. They were like masterpieces, the effort that you put in. It just was like, staggering. And that you had a method for going through papers. I enjoyed that there was a system there, and it wasn't just like, underlining like, Nope, this is wrong. It felt more collaborative, like I was a part of it, rather than me versus you. And that was fresh. I liked that. I don't know. It just felt like I was in good hands.

[15:41]

PETER: I think one of the things that struck me, besides first being struck by your obvious size, which was formidable even then—I think you were all of 6’5” when I met you—but also that you were an athlete. You played lacrosse and football, at the very least; I knew that. But then also you were a very serious singer: you took your role in various choral groups, not just, the big choir, and then would sing in the musicals. So the kind of parts that you had going on, and that you just leaned into all of it. It seemed to me was this was a striking feature.

GREG: Yeah, if I could have been graded on my extracurriculars, I would have had a lot better grades in school! As I said, I wasn't a great student. But I really excelled at some of those other things and really enjoyed them and bulked up my schedule to do all of that that I could. It was a huge part of my life. And yeah, I loved it. If it wasn't for that, I don't know what I would have done.

PETER: So let's move forward a little bit, because I saw you again when we were both singing in the Westfield Chorale. I was doing it as a teacher. And this was a group—listeners to this podcast know that they were just featured in an episode where they were providing the music for a new version of A Christmas Carol. We met up again then when you returned as an alum, and I was still singing as a faculty member. And we just reconnected again, and I found out about what you were doing. What were a couple of the things that you would say that engaged you after college? You had a career for a couple of years, right, singing professional opera?

[17:46]

GREG: So my goal was to become a performer, an operatic singer or classical singer. And I was on that track. I graduated from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers, and that was a fantastic experience. And I got another teacher, Marc Embree, who was a wonderful influence on me. And I was able to tour with him on a show he was doing with the Da Capo Opera Theatre, a little teeny tiny opera theatre in basically the basement of an East Side Church in New York, but I don't even know if it exists anymore. But, you know, I for the first time got paid for being in a show. And it was like, Whoa! Like, What? I couldn't believe it. And it was just in the chorus, right, but I had such a good time. And so then I decided I was going to keep going with that. And, you know, various opportunities came about. I got a lot of performance experience, but that moment was a seminal moment for me. It was like, Okay, this is what I want to do. And then my teacher got a job in Chicago as a professor, so I was like, All right, well, I'm gonna go to Chicago. I’ll go to school there and get some performance experience. And it was wonderful.

[20:05]

PETER: So of course, the next logical step was The Jerry Springer Show.

GREG: The Jerry Springer Show. Right? To be frank, this was around around 2008: the economy was tanking, and I had a bunch of student loans. And I was just like, I don't know, I'm not ready to make a living singing. Like, I'm not there yet.

PETER: Sure.

GREG: So I just had to get a job. And so through networking craziness, I got a job at The Jerry Springer Show, which was still in Chicago—surprisingly, I didn't, I had no idea was even on the air. But, you know, someone suggested like, Why don't you interview there? So I was like, All right, and so they hired me. And I showed up with a tie, like really buttoned up. And the first thing they said was “Dumb it down and lose the tie.” I was like, Okay, I'm in a different world now. It was a lot of fun, unlike anything that I'd ever experienced. I talked to all sorts of people. And that led to an opportunity to do a remote [video] shoot. So we would go out in the field, shoot, and bring the tape back, and it would air, and I just was like, Wow, something I just shot now is going to be on the show! And that just felt amazing. So I was like, Maybe I should stick with this. And I did that for 12 years. And I also worked on The Steve Wilkos Show, mainly.

[21:39]

PETER: I wanted to ask, though, just because as you know, of course, Jerry Springer just died last year.

GREG: Yeah.

PETER: He he had an influence on you.

GREG: I would say so. I didn't get a chance to work with him one on one as much as I would have liked. But the times that I did, he's just the most generous, intelligent person that I know, he's just such a good person. And nothing like, you know, the show, right? He would always joke that he's “ruining the culture,” and tell people not to watch the show. Because deep down he's a good person. And his final thoughts at the end, you know, sometimes were very poignant. And, you know, it was a good time. And he was very generous to the security guys, to all of us on the staff. I couldn't really say enough about him. He was one of the greatest people you could hope to work for.

PETER: And a very committed and gifted politician, a public servant as well. Was it Cincinnati that he was mayor of?

GREG: He was mayor of Cincinnati. And he also worked on the RFK campaign—RFK “I” [senior] that is.

PETER: Not the worm-eaten brain RFK [junior].

GREG: Yeah. He was a politician at heart. He wanted to do public service. That's what his passion was. The show just happened as an accident. He was just asked, because he became a newsreader, he was asked to fill in for this person who was leaving the show. And then that turned into The Jerry Springer Show. And it started off as a legit talk show. They had Oliver North for one of their first episodes. And then the ratings were kind of not there. And the more lowbrow they went, the higher the ratings went until finally they eclipsed Oprah. And that was a very big moment for the show. Yeah, I didn't come in until season 18, or maybe 17. By that time, I didn't realize it was still on the air—but it was, and I'm thankful it was, because I wouldn't have the life I have now if it wasn't for The Jerry Springer Show or The Steve Wilkos Show.

PETER: So you had you had Springer, you had Wilkos— Not to give him or that show short shrift, but we’re getting to this point where you open your own production company. You've got these years of experience and you decide you want to strike out on your own with Action J Productions.

 [24:15]

Yes. The idea there was, you know, I had been working on the shows for about 12 years, gained a lot of experience in how to put a production together and how to put a compelling video together. And gradually, over time, became confident enough to say like, Okay, maybe I could do this on my own. And it's been a huge challenge, to be quite honest! I am not at the level of success I want to be yet, but I love the effort. I get to choose who I do work with. And one of the first thoughts I had was Maybe I can work with you, because I was listening to your podcast and I was just like, Man, I feel there's a lot of potential here. And that's how that thought began. After years of being in the confrontational talk show genre, I just felt like I wanted to go in a different direction. I felt like I wanted to add something to the culture that was more serious and helpful to people.

[25:27]

Hi everybody, this is Keith Zemsky. Pete was my English teacher for AP English about 20 years ago. Now this is the part of the episode where people drop in, and they tell you that they contribute to the show, and maybe you should too! This strategy is sometimes called “the bandwagon effect,” or “social proof.” I'm here to tell you: don't fall for it! If you like the show and want to support it, go ahead. Put your money where your mouth is. Fine. But don't feel any pressure to give a lot. This pressure campaign is totally inappropriate. Let me tell you something. As Pete loves to remind me, I make a lot of money these days. I'm not bragging here—just reporting. Do you think I give Pete a lot of money for Point of Learning, a show I can stream for free, by the way, just like you can? Hell no. Absolutely not. I give about three bucks a month through Patreon, which means Pete can probably buy a couple of AA batteries and a cup of coffee. Let's be real. It's been 50 episodes, which is great. But on the other hand, he's been doing this for seven years. How many podcasters do you know who have been at it for seven years and only made 50 episodes? That’s only one every two months, which is a pretty low production rate, frankly. So bottom line: Give if you want to, but only if you want to, and only as much as you want to. You can pay him through PayPal, Patreon. He also accepts Carrier Pigeon, Bitcoin, other crypto … The details are on the show page if you want them. Thank you for your kind attention. Pete is absolutely the best. Now back to the show!

[26:46]

GREG: So one day, when I was on vacation in Point Pleasant Beach with my family, I was just walking and you popped in my head because we had done some work together with RD Unfiltered, [a YouTube series starring] my wife's cousin Britt.

[VO]: That Point of Learning podcast episode, which Greg produced, is called “NO BAD FOOD with Britt Schuman-Humbert,” a registered dietician who has delicious, healthy, and sane ideas about food. She also supports trans kids in her private practice, so this one’s a great episode to visit or revisit during Pride month, or any month. Greg and I had a blast putting it together.

GREG: I loved doing that. That experience of working, of collaborating with you was so positive that I was like, I want to keep doing this. I don't want to lose this. And so I helped you out a couple times, just very minimally, on a couple of your other videos. And then I got to thinking we should create a master class. Like we should do something that sort of encompasses the experience of being a student of Mr. Horn—Dr. Horn. Either that experience itself, or teach other teachers how to incorporate some of your techniques. And so, you know, we did a few episodes, test episodes, or test modules. The idea was to make like a master class, like you would see—you know, there's all sorts of online education material—

PETER:—including one that famously calls itself MasterClass™.

GREG: Ok, but no. That’s a trademark there, but this is like a “master” space “class.”

PETER: And you can hear that space, so no intellectual property infringement at all!

GREG: No. Yeah, this is for, you know, graduate level students, or maybe undergrad, that are looking for enrichment in tips and techniques for how to be a more effective teacher. You know, some of the stuff that you wouldn't get normally in school in your normal classes. So that was my idea. And so we shot a bunch of stuff. And, you know, hopefully, it turns into something, but right now, we're focusing a lot on civil discourse, which is— Everyone needs this education: the fact that people are so entrenched on either side, and they're just in their own camps. They're literally in camps. And they won't come out to talk.

[VO]: We recorded this conversation mid-May 2024, when news stories proliferated about college campus protests against the War in Gaza, including many images of encampments set up by protesters.

GREG: It doesn't matter what the issue is. It's Either you're with me or you're against me. And we need to figure out a way to have conversations that are hard. And I believe through your research and experience and methods that we've hit on something that is helpful, and at least moves the needle.

PETER: It was really kind of shopping out some of those early samples, the pilots or teaser modules, you know, the sample videos—as we talked about them to some folks who really told us over and over and again, in different ways, that the civil discourse topic—just having better hard conversations, having better conversations about hard topics—this is “the thing that the world needs right now.” I mean, we heard that from a couple people in explicitly those words: “The world needs this right now.” And so if you subscribe, as I do, to the goal that you should try to find the sweet spot of what it is that you love to do, what it is that you're good at, and what it is that the world needs—if you're fortunate enough to be able to operate in that sweet spot of where those circles converge—I think for us, right now, it's about civil discourse. You got Trump-Biden 2024, you got Gaza, Israel, Palestine—

GREG: Police brutality, Black Lives Matter, all this stuff—

PETER: You got Congress bringing in K-12 educators after they're finished, you know, raking college presidents over the coals about what? And how, honestly, are they really sharing what it is that they're actually concerned about, or motivated by? There's so many levels of posturing and signaling, and, of course, incredible market forces that prevail on these conversations. We inhabit this United States, where we have really a set of ideas that we tell ourselves. It’s a set of ideas and values that hold us together, because it's not, you know, the common ethnic ancestry that so many people have, or even even the common territory, you know, of people who have been living in a country for hundreds of years. Some people have, but we get new people all the time, that's the U.S. deal. So we're really held together, in terms of national identity, by this really precarious mix of concepts. That’s the way it’s supposed to be, but then, of course, that unity doesn't make you much money if you can't market to different segments of it. And so there's always a tension between the division that marketers—not to, you know, defame any particular group or profession—but anybody marketing an idea or a product [can exploit]. But all too often those ideas are division and rancor, because they yield control and influence for somebody. So I think the national conversation being where it is, the best—you know, one of the best moves we can make is to try to work on that next generation, or the people who are just about to enter into the conversation, which is to say, high school students. This [module] gives, I think, the clearest idea so far of what we've made, of the kind of thing that we would like to make a series along these lines today. And so our next step is to try to get that in front of more organizations who do similar kinds of work. So: organizations that are committed to civic conversations and civil discourse, and anybody who's trying to safeguard democracy in this in this particularly precarious time, or who feels that there might be some value for this particular set of skills, such as we're exposing, or introducing in this short video.

[34:15]

GREG: The time is now for people to hear how to have better, more productive conversations, how to have civil discourse. The time is now, so it can't wait for us to, you know, sell our show, or sell our series. We need to put this out now. And hopefully, it's enough for someone to say, Hey, you know, I'd like to see more of this. I believe in this. Make more. Make more of this stuff. You know, that's the hope. Because up till now it's been a passion project. We've put a lot of hours of our time into it, and we're excited to share it. I'm excited for people to see it. But just know that it's geared for teachers. It's not meant really for a general audience just yet. But that's where we're at. I love the progress we've made on it. And I hope we can make a lot more.

[VO]: So we may have started sounding a little bit like a public broadcasting pledge drive there toward the end, but there’s a reason for that. We’re proud of what we’ve made, and if you like it too, we would like your help connecting this content with people who might be interested in helping us make more modules along these lines. I really am about to share the audio, but do keep in mind that this is only the audio, so some things—quacking duck sounds, for instance—will make a lot more sense when you see the beautiful video that Greg has produced. Ready? Here you go: audio from the first Point of Learning with Peter Horn Master Class module on civil discourse: The title of this 14-minute module, geared specifically toward HS English teachers, but that I hope is interesting to anyone curious about what and how and why we learn, is “Respectful Conversations: How and Why to Practice Civil Discourse.” You’d be able to see that on the title card if you were watching the video. Did we mention this is a video? Aight, here you go! 

[36:13—audio from “Respectful Conversations: How and Why to Practice Civil Discourse,” the pilot video for Point of Learning Master Class]

PETER HORN: Do you remember that week in 2015, when then-CEO Howard Schultz encouraged baristas at 12,000 Starbucks locations to write the words “race together” on customers’ cups in order to begin discussions about race relations in the U.S.? The experiment did not go well, as almost everyone guessed that it would not. And why should it have gone well? Conversations about hard topics like race relations require mutual respect, and some level of relational trust—which are not defining features of going to buy coffee from a national chain of stores. In this segment, I’m going to focus on what is sometimes called “civil discourse”: what it is (essentially, respectful conversations); why it's hard, and some strategies for how to practice civil discourse in the classroom. But first, why civil discourse matters. Three guesses who said the following, back in October of 2017:

“We have seen our discourse degraded by casual cruelty. At times, it can seem like the forces pulling us apart are stronger than the forces binding us together. Argument turns to easily into animosity. Disagreement escalates into dehumanization. Too often, we judge other groups by their worst examples, while judging ourselves by our best intentions—” Any guesses?

That was President George W. Bush, on October 19 2017, nine months into the Trump administration. What he's talking about is civil discourse, a term that has its advantages and disadvantages. So I want to explain quickly why I use it. For the first part, the adjective “civil,” the benefit is that it succinctly conveys two meanings. When we say discourse is civil, we're talking about things in a way that is respectful, and also things that are focused on areas of shared concern for a community, such as when we talk about “civil wars.” The downside of the adjective “civil” is its colonial baggage. It's very close to judgments of which cultures are “civilized” or “uncivilized,” where the hegemonic superpower imposes its judgment on another culture that it seeks to overpower and subsume, or be settled involuntarily. For the noun “discourse,” the benefit is that it can refer to different kinds of communication, from writing to speeches to discussion. I'll be focused on discussion in this segment. The downside is that the word discourse just sounds strange to lots of people. Nevertheless, I'm talking here mostly about respectful conversation about areas of shared concern. My aim is building our capacity to talk respectfully with people about these issues, especially those areas where people are apt to disagree. It's fine if you want to call it “civil discussion” or “civil dialogue” or “respectful discussion”: whatever makes sense to you and the kids you are teaching. I'm just glad you're doing it.

Now there are many reasons why civil discourse is hard to do. Here are five of them: First, people just plain look at the world differently. So when you're thinking about areas of shared concern, people sharing that concern have different takes. Take the basic idea of change. Some people tend to believe that change is good for us—that social change, for instance, tends to yield positive results for most everybody, if not absolutely everybody. It's fair to recognize that the U.S., for instance, has traditionally valued some people's perspectives more than other people's perspectives. So changing that would be a good thing. On the other hand, some people believe that change tends to be negative; their attitude is more like, Things are pretty good the way they are. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. It’s fair to observe that every new technology brings unanticipated negative consequences alongside advances. Nuclear power may just be the energy source that saves us from catastrophic climate change, but nuclear warheads have the destructive capacity to destroy the planet many times over.

A second reason that civil discourse is hard: Controversial topics are often avoided, so there's little opportunity for kids especially to practice having reasonable conversations about these areas of shared concern. Think of that drunk uncle at Thanksgiving who spouts off, even though everyone's been encouraged to avoid politics at the dinner table. In this respect, civil discourse is a lot like critical thinking more broadly: if kids don't have the opportunity to practice it in school, they are unlikely to learn how to do it ever.

A third reason that civil discourse is hard is that it makes terrible television. So if it happens on TV, almost nobody watches it. There's never been a viral civil discourse video. Trust me. I've tried to make one! So there are few examples for kids outside of school to experience people wrestling with ideas or listening patiently to somebody with another viewpoint, let alone actually changing their mind. Some of the most important modeling we do as classroom teachers is giving students an opportunity to watch somebody think, including the boring parts or false starts or changing your mind. But it matters. Those times when you can say something like, “You guys came at me a little hard for the due date on this paper. But you know what, lots of you are involved with the X exam, or the Y championship or the Z school performance. So I'm going to move the due date back a week.” Small examples of compromise matter, so kids today won't grow into the Congress of tomorrow that can't somehow compass compromise as an essential part of the messy, small-d democratic process.

Fourth, as we all know too well from U.S. and world politics, we are afraid to get kicked off the team. We're here today because our ancestors survived. And they survived because they learned how to establish cooperative networks. We are wired to commit to teams and tribes. What this means for you most urgently as a classroom teacher is to listen carefully for those kids who might worry that they’ll be kicked off the team for trying out an idea or sharing what they truly believe about a topic. So you need to make sure your classroom is a place where every kid is honored as a person, and that they are encouraged to honor the humanity of everyone else.

A fifth reason civil discourse is hard is that facilitating any kind of conversation is the most complex classroom skill to master: Q&A is one thing, but getting kids to really talk with each other is a skill and an art that takes months and years of practice. I hope it goes without saying that it's critical for educators to observe the difference between modeling how to think and indoctrinating what to think. Furthermore, if you're in a school or district obsessing about test scores, or finding itself in the crosshairs of groups of parents or legislators believing that they understand more about the complexities of education and adolescent development than professionals like you who have devoted their careers to kids and teaching and learning—it ain't gonna be easy!

However, if you believe, as I do, that the only way to a better national discourse is by teaching young people to do it better, I've got four suggestions for you to start with. Remember, the fundamental requirement is respect. We're going to differ about things, but I respect you as a human being. A teacher I spoke with recently uses James Baldwin's line: “We can disagree and still love each other, unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.” Respect is a two-way street, so to get started, here's a strong way to show students you respect their ideas, just as you're hoping they respect yours.

Civil Discourse Suggestion #1: solicit feedback from your students on your class. Hear me out. The standard model is teachers assess students. I'm saying, if you want to get as good as you can as fast as you can at this very difficult job, invite your students to assess you, too. They might not be experts in English Language Arts, but they are experts in how they learn best. Over the course of my 18 years in the high school English classroom, my favorite strategy along these lines—and the one I learned the most from—was this: Every two or three months (the end of a 10-week marking period is ideal), allow a few minutes for kids to fill out anonymous 3x5 cards with their candid responses to questions like, What works about this class? What doesn't work? Comments/Suggestions. The best feedback I ever got on my teaching—better than any supervisor’s report—came from their answers. When I made good changes based on what they wrote, they told me they were being heard.

Community building activities and discussion prompts also help to establish and reinforce mutual respect, and gradually, trust builds over the course of the semester or year. For building trust on top of respect, start small, build up the level of risk gradually. Here are some prompts you can use. First are some low- to no-risk prompts, and then some questions that invite some risk from students. And then discussion launchers that really encourage class members to get to know each other at a deeper level. You'll notice that most of these have nothing to do with the prescribed English curriculum—unless you believe, as I do, that 50% of your curriculum walks in the door with your students. My former colleague Emily Style shared that gem with me, and I share it every chance I get. The more you all know about each other and the texts of your own lives, the more deeply you'll be able to connect with, explore, and apply the texts you study together. Some of these prompts I have adapted come from the article cited at the bottom of the screen [Jill Harrison Berg, Christine Connolly, Abda Lee, and Emmanuel Fairly. “A Matter of Trust: How a Boston Turnaround School Built Its Plan for Improvement Around Relational Trust,” Educational Leadership, March 2018]. Some have been suggested by teachers like you that I've worked with in recent years.

NO RISK: “Share some good news.” “How was your weekend?” “What's your dream vacation?” “What season best describes you, and why?” “What condiment could you not do without?” “What was a favorite book of yours when you were little?”

INVITE RISK: “What's a personal or academic hope you have this year?” “Use your gestures to draw a picture or show how you feel right now. We'll make two guesses!” “Sum up your day so far in three words or less.” “What do you like about the end of the school year?” “If you could devote the next three months to learning something, what would it be?” “Share your six word memoir.”

ENCOURAGE RISK: “Share a recent win in your life.” “What's something you tried that made you want to give up?” “Tell about a person who challenged you. What did you learn from them?” “Share a quote or song lyric that's meaningful to you and explain why.” “Think of one thing you have added or removed from your life to improve yourself physically, emotionally, or spiritually.”

To practice lively discussions, choose high-interest topics. Write a clear, discussable question that you, the teacher, are also interested in. Consider using a short text like a passage of a novel or a brief article or poem that confines the parameters of your discussion in class. Develop the discussion ground rules together. Take five minutes to write some thoughts, or sketch or map or doodle in response to that question alongside your students before you pair-share and/or discuss with the full group. Note: doing some tasks with students reinforces not only the value of the assignment, but the image of a more egalitarian classroom.

Develop discussion routines that support more interaction between and among students. Again, most classroom interactions that pass as “discussion,” in my experience, are really a series of questions by teachers and answers by students, which is fine. But that's not how discussion happens in the wild. The following models are adapted from a book called They Say/I Say [Gerald Graff and Kathy Birkenstein (Norton, 2009), pp. 133-135]. Frame your comments as a response to something that's already been said: “I really liked the point that Aaron made earlier when he said that ________. I agree, because ________.”  “I take your point, Nadia, that ________.  But I think that ________.” “Though Sheila and Ryan seem to be at odds about ________, they may not be all that far apart.”

To change the subject, indicate explicitly that you are doing so: “So far we have been talking about ________. But isn't real issue here ________?” “I'd like to change the subject to one that hasn't yet been addressed …”

Be even more explicit than you would be in writing: “So in other words, what I'm trying to get at here is ________.” “My point is this: ________.” “My point, though, is not ________, but ________.” “This distinction is important for several reasons: ________.”

Got it? So those prompts can help. Big picture, how this works—my theory of action, if you will: A learning environment that honors student voice and offers opportunities for students to have some input in their education has a better chance at engaging students as citizens of the classroom invested in a shared enterprise. Once the common purpose is established, teachers can build relational trust with small, low- to no-risk activities as opportunities to practice civil discourse before tackling more controversial topics. Short term, we support students in engaging meaningfully with different viewpoints. Long term, we achieve a more reasonable national discourse.

[50:57]

[VO]: I’m jumping in here because, as you’ll hear when you check out the video, which I hope you’ll do—it’s really slick, you guys—it ends, as most episodes of this podcast do, with the end of “Villainous Thing,” courtesy of Shayfer James. I thought including the signature closing music twice might make the end of this episode a bit tricky to navigate, so I’m just gonna bring it up real casual as I read us out in a second. Before I do that, I want to give an example of a topic I’ve been urging the school leaders I’m consulting with right now to pursue as their teachers and students practice civil discourse. You don’t want to start with super-charged issues like abortion or the War in Gaza or the 2024 Election, but you do want to start with something real. Every middle and high school I know of is contending with issues related to cell phone addiction, including social media, and online harassment, intimidation and bullying. Because our phones are very carefully designed to addict us, this is an authentic issue of shared concern for adults as well as young people that they can practice sharing honestly about as they think through together what makes sense for them as a learning community to do about it. Any policy steps schools take after giving everyone a chance to think through their concerns and questions together will have a much greater chance of success than if rules and restrictions are introduced from the top down. Jonathan Haidt has a new book about this called The Anxious Generation, but he’s been thinking about phones and social media for years, as we discussed when he was my guest in 2020. You can find a link to that episode on the show page. Also on the show page are full citations of the article and book I referred to in the civil discourse segment you just heard, a full transcript, and a link to the brand new Point of Learning Master Class video itself! Because Greg and I really would like to know if you know of anyone or any organization who might be interested in supporting our civil discourse video project—or if you have ideas about organizations or institutions we should share it with, please shoot me an email at pointoflearningpodcast@gmail.com That’s right, all one word: pointoflearningpodcast@gmail.com. Would you believe that when I went to go set that address up specifically for this special 50th episode, I was disappointed (and a little threatened) that the address was taken, only to realize that in fact *I* had set up the address in 2017 and forgotten all about it? True story! So try it out, send me an email at pointoflearningpodcast@gmail.com if you have any feedback or ideas about any aspect of this episode or any other. I love compliments, but it’s the constructive criticism that keeps me at the point of learning. Special thanks to Molly Colvin and Gil Scott Chapman for the music they recorded for previous episodes that was featured again today. The clip of Greg singing in his senior recital at Mason Gross featured pianist Lynda Saponara. The song is called “Fear No More the Heat o’ the Sun,” with text from Shakespeare’s play Cymbeline and music by Roger Quilter.  Finally, thanks to you for listening, rating, reviewing, sharing this audio or the YouTube video of the civil discourse module prominently featured on the show page with anyone interested in what and how and why we learn. Point of Learning is written, recorded, edited, mixed, mastered, and produced by me, here in Sunny Buffalo, New York. I’m Peter Horn, and I’ll be back at you very soon with Dr. John Webb and his new book Molyvos: A Greek Village’s Heroic Response to the Global Refugee Crisis. See you then!

MOSTLY MAJOR CHORDS TRANSCRIPT (049)

ALANA MORALES: Hey there! This is Alana Morales and you are at the Point of Learning with my dear friend Peter Horn. I have been a fan of Shayfer James’s work since I first heard him sing “Mostly Major Chords” at Peter’s living room piano so many years ago. In fact, I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing a few live concerts from Shayfer and Peter. From then on, I’ve admired Shayfer as an artist and as a lyricist. Let’s listen to the inside scoop of his creative process together. Enjoy the show!

[00:43]

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today’s show, the singer-songwriter who wrote this music!

SHAYFER JAMES: I think that songwriting is how I learn about myself.

[VO]: Shayfer James shares some of what he’s learned so far.

SHAYFER: And I would never stop doing it if everybody who listened went away, because it’s part of my learning process, like how I learned to be better at being a person, how I learned to communicate, and share my feelings outside of the creative space.

[VO]: Shayfer reflects on a few ingredients he uses to make what he does.

SHAYFER: It is different every time, and also through stages of my creative life. At the beginning, really, it was all words first. It was really like writing poems in a journal, and then the music would come. And then it became sort of the simultaneous thing. And then I would say, I think I’ve found my actual real process.

[VO]: All that, and much more, from classroom to stage to learning wherever he’s at, right here and now! Saddle up, because we’re off to the races with Shayfer James!

[01:57]

[VO]: If you’ve listened to this podcast for any amount of time, you’re already familiar with the music of Shayfer James. Shayfer’s songs “Weight of the World” and “Villainous Thing” have opened and closed nearly every episode since I started this podcast passion project in 2017. That year was already 20 years after I first met Shayfer as my student in English IV in the fall of 1997, and several years into a cherished friendship where he has many times been my teacher. As an artist, he has made a name for himself in the world of what is generally classified by Apple Music as indie rock, although some music critics apply the description “pop-noir” as they reckon with the darkness in some of his lyrics. His music is wide-ranging in style and color, so it’s hard to pigeonhole, but I agree with the reviewers who describe it as “captivating,” sometimes “swaggering,” and “moving,” “with a hint of mystery and surprise.” Shayfer has composed somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 songs over the past decade and a half … or about 4 hours of music on Spotify, where each month he currently engages over a quarter-million listeners who stream his songs over one and a half million times per month. His music is very popular on YouTube as well, to say nothing of the endless remixes that his fans create over on TikTok. Shayfer is a creator whose resume also includes film scores and a new musical based on the ancient epic of Beowulf—that project is called The Ninth Hour, co-created with Kate Douglas. I’ll have links for you to connect to his music in the show notes for this episode if you’d like to getter better acquainted with his work. If you want a quick index of how much his music means to me, I can tell you that tracking the viola part for the song you’re hearing right now was the last commitment of any kind I made in New Jersey, where I had lived for 25 years, before moving back to Buffalo in 2018. This song is called “Crack a Bottle, Run a Bath,” which would be easier to tell if this weren’t just the instrumental version and you could hear Shayfer’s lyrics. Anyway, Robyn’s and my stuff was boxed up and waiting for the moving van in Plainfield, and I drove over to Jersey City to record viola for this song. Sure, I’m also implying that I’m a reliable friend, but my real point is that if it’s at all possible, I would never not play something Shayfer James asks me to play. I’ve played music for going on 50 years at this point, and I’ve had the chance to play with some extraordinary musicians in venues around the world, and if I had to list the very brightest musical highlights from my life, more than half would involve playing music with this man. It’s not just his creative genius, his fearless piano playing, or his hauntingly beautiful voice; he’s also one of the kindest people I’ve ever met, and he surrounds himself with other artists who are a joy to collaborate with. As you’ll hear in the conversation that follows, I’ve seen Shayfer in different contexts—from overhearing fans at his shows tell him how much his music means to them to watching him interact as a co-teacher with my own students. I’ve witnessed him captivate and engage all kinds of audiences, which is another reason I’m excited to finally feature him as a guest on this podcast that he’s supported from before Day One as a way to share good ideas about what and how and why we learn. Heads up that we get just the tiniest bit salty towards the end of our conversation, with maybe two un-bleeped curse words in the last segment. They’re nothing saltier than you’d hear in a former president’s description of the legal charges facing him later this month in New York City, but really, what kind of standard is that? We’re about to get into the conversation we recorded in Shayfer’s home studio in Jersey City in early March 2024. But before that, I’d like to let the singer-songwriter himself handle the last bit of bio. Here’s his song called “God Forbids,” which Shayfer sometimes describes as his 3-minute autobiography.

[06:30. “God Forbids” from AMERICANACHRONISM (2021) EP by Shayfer James]

Grandpa fought in Germany

And Daddy was a spy

Mother made a home for me

And taught me not to lie

My brothers and my sisters

Became Christians and had kids

And I been out here doin'

All the things that God forbids

Yeah I been out here doin'

All the things that God forbids

Oh I thought about the army

When the towers tumbled down

I tried to be a husband

And I died in Chinatown

They say there's calm for everyone

I'm pretty sure there is

I'll find it while I'm doin'

All the things that God forbids

I'll find it while I'm doin'

All the things that God forbid

Oh I've nevеr heard a promise

That I honestly bеlieved

So I haven't found a lover

That I couldn't learn to leave

But I'm tryin' not to worry

And I'm easy to forgive

So I'll be out here doin'

All the things that God forbids

Yeah I'll be out here doin'

All the things that God forbids

Now I'm late for every party

But I'm grateful for my friends

Cause I know they'll spread my ashes

On the Ocean when it ends

So sing with me in revelry

For how the heathen lives

And I'll be out here doin'

All the things that God forbids

Cause I been out here doin'

All the things that God forbids

I'll find it while I'm doin'

All the things that God forbids

[09:01]

PETER: It’s so good to be able to talk to you, especially looking toward the milestone of 50 episodes, you’ve been such a supporter of the Point of Learning project from the very beginning, encouraging me to go forward and do something with it. Of course, your music features on the show, and you’ve always been a resource for me, in terms of trying to make it sound as good as possible, giving me tips. I thought it was appropriate at this juncture to sit down and talk with you about learning in the context of the music that you make. It’s true that I really don't think of you this way anymore—that is to say, as my former student—except when I want to brag on you and kind of imply that I may have had something to do with it, but I never go that far! But it wasn't just the first year I was teaching; it was actually the first class that I taught as a teacher: Period 3 [English IV] in the fall of 1997. It was the very first class that I taught. And so it might be interesting if there's anything that you recall. I recall a couple of things from that year, but is there anything that you recall from my first year as a teacher?

SHAYFER: Oh yeah. Well firstly, I was an easily distracted student, especially at that point, toward the end of high school. And I often found lessons to be boring. I found school to be pretty boring.

PETER: Why am I just finding this out?

SHAYFER: But I remember walking in—I don't know if it was the first day, but you had the lyrics to “Hotel California” by The Eagles on the blackboard. And, you know, we played the song—you often did this, where we would sort of do like these brief, I guess, lyric analyses—at the beginning of class, or once a week—I don't remember exactly what the format was, or how often it happened. But I was so interested in that. And you seemed cool and hip, you know, you were a hip young teacher, you had a bowtie—

PETER: Yeah, so cool I had a bowtie! Those were my “Tucker [Carlson]” days!

SHAYFER: And immediately—the way you spoke to us, I think, succinctly and with respect, you know, and not so much like I’m your teacher and this is the lesson, but more conversational. That struck me, and it really quickly became my favorite class. And I would say, looking back at my high school experience, my favorite class, in that period of my education. You know, I liked music class, I liked drama class. But again, I don’t know that I was always really super in it, you know? I was that C student that just sort of coasted by and really, you know, should have done more maybe, but I really didn’t feel compelled to most of the time.

PETER: And so this was senior year English for you, English IV, what I remember is that when we were doing Hamlet and I gave the option—and as you mentioned, you were in drama class; you were in the fall drama, the spring musical, you were active in the drama program—but when I gave options for what people could do, most people chose like a little portion of a scene with one or two other people. You were the only person who chose to do a monologue.

SHAYFER: I didn't know that!

PETER: Do you remember what that monologue was?

SHAYFER: It was the big one!

PETER: “To be or not to be”! I was like, This guy! This guy right here! You know, you were like, Well, I’ll just go ahead and learn that. And it was really good, as I recall.

SHAYFER: I remember I had like a fake knife, if I recall—

PETER: It was a “bare bodkin,” sir. [Reference to Hamlet (3.1) “For who would bear the whips and scorns of time/ … /When he himself might his quietus make/ With a bare bodkin?”] That was before they outlawed bodkins in the public schools.

SHAYFER: And I remember making that part of the monologue.

PETER: Maybe that’s why I was encouraged to give a good grade! You did have a weapon. “That was excellent!” But yeah, you were taking some risks. In the years since, of course, part of the delight—you know, I think I already referred to that you’ve taught me a little tiny fraction of all that you understand about audio engineering, and so the things that sound good about this podcast are in no small measure to the things that you have taught me. (And when it falls short of that mark, that’s me doing it on my own!) But in addition to that way that you’ve taught me, you know, I've brought you in as a Musician in Residence, and so we actually had the opportunity to co-teach students in Project ’79 [the alternative high school program where I was teaching]. We did it in different formats, like sometimes you were there for the better part of a week, or sometimes you did like weekly visits for a month or, you know, but to have a real working singer-songwriter, making songs with students … I remember starting out with drum circles in some cases, and you know, the song-writing was never attached to any kind of grade, and we let kids kind of come in as they were, as they expressed more or less interest. But with the music and lyrics creation, just presenting the idea that songwriting could be available to them, even if they didn't consider themselves a musician or certainly a songwriter already—that they could do it! So that was beautiful for me to have that experience, and of course, I always learned a great deal working alongside you. Do you have any thoughts or reflections about any of those residencies?

SHAYFER: Yeah, I remember being really nervous that these kids were going to hate it, or, you know, not show up. Or even be—I don’t know—rude! I had no idea what to expect. I remember being excited do it, but scared to do it. And we did start with a drum circle, and we built the song on rhythm. [Audio: example of drum circle.] And that felt like the right thing to do with people who had maybe never tried to write songs before, because that rhythm is natural. I remember saying that like, for natural rhythm,  maybe I started with like the beat of your heart, right?

PETER: Oh yeah! Heartbeat!

SHAYFER: There’s a natural rhythm there. And that's how we started.

[16:00]

[VO]: What I was thinking when Shayfer made this point was a fact about normal heartbeats—lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub—that I often made to students but I thought at the time that it was a little too nerdy to inject into our conversation right then. As I think about it now, it’s exactly nerdy enough for the Point of Learning audience! The normal heartbeat is an iamb, that same unstressed-stressed building block of Shakespeare’s famous iambic pentameter that probably makes the rhythm feel more or less natural to people. “To be or not to be”: lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub. “You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!” [Julius Caesar 1.1] Pretty cool, right? See now this here is why God invented voiceover!

SHAYFER: And I remember, like when I did it the one day and then when I came back, there were more students there. There was a little bit of chatter, and some more folks showed up.

PETER: Word had spread!

SHAYFER: Yeah, and it became really exciting and something I really looked forward to, and I think they looked forward to the collaboration with people that really started off not speaking the creative language that I was speaking in, and ending it with the songs that we ended up with. We actually did—what was it? I think it was two songs, right? Two or three?

PETER: It was different in different years, but there was one year that I feel like the two classes you worked with each cut and recorded—I mean you helped to bring the thing to completion, but I mean, like, there were discs, you know, with their songs on them. That was pretty cool!

SHAYFER: Yeah, I just remember it being exciting. And I think I learned about the process of songwriting by teaching it in some way, so pretty awesome!

PETER: Yeah, it’s one of those bromides that if you really want to understand something, try and teach it—or try and explain it really well, but that’s, of course, a facet of teaching. And for what it’s worth, I’ve never met a good teacher who wasn’t nervous, at least going in the first time. You know, people who do it for decades and decades—that night in September or August, whatever it is before your first class is usually a period where you're like, “Ah! How’s it gonna be with these kids?” But you were a natural, and then, you know, the kids understandably gravitated towards you.

[18:54. From one of these student-composed songs, “We Are Not To Blame” (2011)]

Your war is not my problem

We are not to blame

I'm weak but I'll recover

Do you have no shame?

Your struggle ain’t my world

I make my own sky blue

Your freedom flag unfurled

This cannot all be true

We are not to blame

We are all the same

[19:29]

[VO]: That was some of “We Are Not to Blame,” composed by the juniors of my Period 5 English III class in the spring of 2011. My kids asked Shayfer to sing the lead vocal part, but they wrote the lyrics, they created the percussion track, and a few stepped forward to record backup vocals. Almost none of them thought of themselves as a musician before Shayfer’s residency. By the end of it, they’d made a song!

PETER: It was about that time, it was during one of those residencies, I think, that you also—and I forget what platform you were doing it on: I don’t know if it was Snapchat or whatever it was, but you were kind of doing a challenge to write a song every day? Or every week? Something like that. But you were asking for suggestions from people?

SHAYFER: Yeah, it was on Facebook.

PETER: Oh, just on Facebook.

SHAYFER: And then I would post the videos to YouTube.

PETER: Right. And you got a suggestion for “love and time travel” from just a fan or somebody who read that post and was like, write a song about this.

SHAYFER: Yeah.

PETER: And I feel like it took you, in this case—this is not necessarily typical—but in this case, it took you like 30 minutes. It just kind of came out, and it’s one of my favorite songs. It’s called “Mostly Major Chords.” I mean, I used it as an example to talk to kids about how much I resented your ability! I’ve never, like, you know—I mean, I composed little tiny minuets when I was studying piano and stuff like “Minuet 4” in the style of Bach, but, you know—like, my mother thought that they were very good, but you know—I’ve never really written any songs. My brother’s a songwriter. I love his work, but it's kind of an alien territory for me, and that you would make something so beautiful, and stirring, and then so quickly—it just made it all the more upsetting and threatening and delightful! Is there anything that you remember about that experience of songwriting?

[21:43]

SHAYFER: Yeah, I think, well, it was a tricky time in my life, personally. And part of the reason I was doing that exercise was because I was having trouble writing. I was navigating just a tough spot. And I think that prompt [“love and time travel”] specifically seemed at first a bit silly. The prompt, at first seemed silly, because it was like a romance movie, you know. But I realized it was super relevant to my life at the time. So I dug in. I can’t really remember the process, but I know that it did happen fast, like super fast. And that was one of the songs that didn’t have any edits. I wrote the lyrics like a poem first. And so the music is pretty simple. I mean, there’s, you know, four chords, one of them being minor.

PETER: “Mostly Major.”

SHAYER: And I did [the music] after the [lyrics]. And the so the song is simple because of that. You know, it was more of a challenge to finish one song per day. And in this case, it was obviously a lot faster than that. But I don't always know or often know what a song is about until after it's done. So I knew that I was writing to prompt, but I didn't know what specifically I was writing about in terms of my own fears, and my understanding of love, and the possibility of regret, and letting go and all that stuff until after I listened to it, or after I wrote it. and then I understood what it was about in terms of my personal experience.

[23:21]

[VO]: I was gonna just crossfade into the song we’ve been talking about, but this is also the favorite song Alana Morales mentioned of their own accord in the episode intro, when they had no idea that Shayfer and I had talked about it during our previously recorded conversation. That lovely bit of synchronicity makes want to direct your attention to this sparkling gem. Once again, the prompt suggested by one of his fans was love and time travel. The song Shayfer composed, disquietingly quickly, is called “Mostly Major Chords.”

[23:58. “Mostly Major Chords” from HOPE AND A HAND GRENADE (2019) EP by Shayfer James]

[Verse 1]
She found me forty years from now
A shadow of myself
Her youth was black mascara
And red wine
We talked for hours
Of how I thought
I'd seen her somewhere else
And she was there beside me when I died

[Chorus]
What's the point in counting
When a minute is a year
Every lover has their time
Every lover has their time
What's the point in waiting
When you're gone
Before you're here
Every lover has their time
Every lover has their time

[Verse 2]
She found me seven years ago
In some piano bar
She told me I'd be paramount someday
She smiled the kind of smile
That builds a fire in the dark
She bought my gin
And then she slipped away

[Chorus]
What's the point in counting
When a minute is a year
Every lover has their time
Every lover has their time
What's the point in waiting
When you're gone
Before you're here
Every lover has their time
Every lover has their time

[Verse 3]
She found me twenty years ago
Outside my father's church
A little boy who fell and scraped his knee
She told me I was beautiful
And took away my hurt
And said that she'd forever wait for me

[Chorus]
What's the point in counting
When a minute is a year
Every lover has their time
Every lover has their time
What's the point in waiting
When you're gone
Before you're here
Every lover has their time
Every lover has their time

[Verse 4]
She found me any minute now
I've waited far too long
This rocking chair
Is wearing through the floor
She'll cry beside herself
To know I've written her this song
And be pleased
That it's in mostly major chords

[Chorus]
What's the point in counting
When a minute is a year
Every lover has their time
Every lover has their time
What's the point in waiting
When you're gone
Before you're here
Every lover has their time
Every lover has their time

[28:12]

PETER: “She smiled the kind of smile/ That builds a fire in the dark.” Where does a line like that come from?

SHAYFER: Couldn't tell you.

PETER: Yeah.

SHAYFER: You know, it’s a tricky thing to talk about and to not sound pretentious when I say “I don't know.” And it seems silly. Like What do you mean you don’t know? I really don't. Because it's not like, Oh, is this a clever line? Sometimes, after I’ve written a song, I’ll go back and say, How can I make this better? How can I make this more succinct, or more playful, depending on what the vibe of the song is. In this case, there was none of that. So I don’t know. I just know that it felt good writing it.

PETER: I know I’ve mentioned to you before that that line in particular just stops me in my tracks, because one of the lines that I think I circled in my copy of Romeo and Juliet when I studied it again as a grad student: It’s when Romeo first sees Juliet across the ballroom. He says, “Oh she doth teach the torches to burn bright!” So it’s very similar, and I don’t know if Shakespeare was ripping you off at that point! But it’s not like that kind of thing in your process that—I mean, you love poetry and read a certain amount of it, and listen to a certain amount of it, you know, but it’s not like that you read it for the purpose of having this store of figures or even meters or things. It’s really just, I think, to you, what sounds good to you, what feels good—

SHAYFER: —and what words feel good together. Because I’m honestly not really a well-read person. And I’ve had lots of conversations of like, Oh you know this writer …, and I don’t! I don’t and I used to be embarrassed by it, you know? Like, How could you not have read this person?

PETER: Do you tell people how lame your English teacher was?

SHAYFER: I do!

PETER: You know what, there’s a reason there’s a reason I just gave up on literature!

SHAYFER: Yeah, but you know, I was into horror and fantasy novels and things like that. But I don’t really know the classics. And I don’t really know the great poets or the great philosophers, so, you know, Oh, that's Nietzsche. That's so-and-so … I’ve read little bites. But I don’t draw from literature really. And I'm sure I've absorbed certain—you know, subconsciously, it's in there, whatever I've read. But yeah, I don't study other people's writing. Or, you know, I may use a prompt, but my prompt usually comes from visual art. Or other mediums, and not the written word, or music.

[31:17]

PETER: Even the diction. I forget which song it’s in, but it was [on the 2010 album] The Owl and the Elephant, but the word “bandolier.”

SHAYFER: Oh, that’s “Insincerely Yours.”

PETER: I was like, A bandolier! Of course, but what a weird word! Where does that come from? You know, it’s like from a World War I movie, or the Old West or something like that …

SHAYFER: And that process— I actually remember writing that song. And being very pleased with myself, I gotta say! Because that stanza, specifically: “ … the old engineer wears a gold bandolier/ And bewilders the horses with whistles and bells.” But it’s like, “I’ll spin you like an ancient carousel,” right?

PETER: Yeah.

SHAYFER: Right, so the engineer on the carousel is doing this sort of mischievous activity, you know, and I think I chose “bandolier” because it rhymed with “engineer” and I thought it was a cool image, you know. But I just remember thinking that that song was very silly—and being very, very pleased with myself when it was finished!

PETER: So you just added a singing saw to it, to finish it off.

SHAYFER: Yeah, obviously! As one does.

[32:38. From “Insincerely Yours” from THE OWL AND THE ELEPHANT (2010) album by Shayfer James]

I'll indulge in every story that you tell

While I swing you like an ancient carousel

Where the old engineer

Wears a gold bandolier

And bewilders the horses with whistles and bells

You'll be waiting for my love to keep you warm…

PETER: In a situation like that, does it just occur to you what “bandolier” rhymes with, or do you ever resort to like a rhyming dictionary or anything like that?

SHAYFER: I didn't for that. I do that, though. Yeah, I definitely check in RhymeZone, especially if I get stuck, you know, with rhymes. Usually, they're in there, they're in my brain. But sometimes I just feel I can't, in my word bank in my brain, find the word to say or what I think I'm trying to say at the moment.

PETER: I used this specific example—which is actually a kind of extraordinary one, “Mostly Major Chords,” in that you produced it so fast—it just tapped something, that suggestion, and you just kind of did it and produced it without real edits. But I think you have said that a more typical version of your process is that you'd get an idea for a lyric, or maybe a part of it, and then work on the music a little bit. And so then you'd have a song, the music of the song, and then fill in the rest of the lyrics. And it's different every time but is that a more typical process?

SHAYFER: Yeah, I think that's probably the most frequent. It is different every time, and also through stages of my creative life. So, at the beginning, really, it was all words first. It was really like writing poems in a journal. And then music would come. And then it became sort of a simultaneous thing. And then I would say, maybe around 2014 is when I think I found my actual real process.

PETER: So about five years into doing it regularly?

SHAYFER: Right, yeah, when I found that if I just listened to myself, like how thoughts were circulating, that song ideas would sort of drop in, you know, and just sort of happen. But it would always be that one word, or like, what is this phrase? And it could be inspired by the strangest thing, right? I could be walking down the street, and there's a buzz in the, you know, generator overhead, and that I'm hearing a tone. And for some reason, that makes me think of a thing. And then I have that single line. You know, it's hard to explain why it happens. But that generally inspires the process. Most recently, when I was working on the new album, it was very different, where the music all came first, and then I actually fully arranged everything, before even writing a word. And then I would play the music on repeat while I went for a walk, and then the words would come pretty rapidly. So it's always been different.

PETER: Interesting.

SHAYFER: But it's through stages of life, too. I think how I'm approaching the creative process is somehow tethered to where I am in my just being a human.

PETER: And I wonder, because in the past year or so you've been able to invest a different kind of time and energy now that you have pulled away from trying to hold down a full time job, in addition to being a touring musician and creator. You've been able to focus on doing music full time. I wonder if that's opened up some different possibilities. I’m thinking, for example, of the poet Lucille Clifton, who wrote at a certain point in her career very short poems. And when she was asked about it, she was like, This is the length of poem that I could remember while I was vacuuming, or doing chores around the house, because she was raising—I forget how many kids she had, but she was a busy mother in addition, so the rhythms of her life lent themselves to short poems at that particular period. I wonder if it's different for you because you just took a retreat for basically the better part of a month?

SHAYFER: Yeah, I think it's different. Because when I was, you know, working a full time job, or several, whatever it was, through the years, I was writing music in what felt like my spare time. And so when that all went away, I actually found myself with a lot of spare time. Too much spare time! And I didn’t, at the beginning, really know what to do with the time. And luckily, at the very beginning, when I left all that stuff, I was traveling a lot. So I didn't have a whole bunch of idle time. But when I got back from the U.S. tour for SHIPWRECK [2023 album] and the European stuff, and I got back to my apartment, I was like, What do I do? How do people do this full-time? And this is all that they do. I didn’t know what to do with the time. And what ended up happening is I found that I needed to go away for a month to write. Because day to day, I didn't have that urgency. I didn't have the compartment to write every day, like this is when this is when you power off your computer, you go get a drink, you come back, and you work on music—that was gone. And I sort of was flailing a little bit. So I've had to reframe my approach to creativity. Because of all the extra time I have, which sounds really weird, because you'd think it would just be delight, I can write all the time, but it's not possible for me to do that. Because very often when the idea comes, I’d be thinking about it all day while I was doing all these things. And once I closed my work computer, I rushed to the creative process, because it's been swirling in my head all day, you know, so there was an urgency that I needed to get whatever this idea was out—done. And so that's changed a lot.

PETER: Yeah, I'm thinking of the student athletes who say that they're actually most productive in terms of homework and efficiency during their season, because they know that they only have a certain amount of time to get it done. And so they're much more on-task, because it becomes scarce.

SHAYFER: That's very much the case.

PETER: I want to ask about the touring aspect. Because that's another thing that you've been able—you know, you used to make time to do it, you'd make arrangements when you were working for companies and stuff like that to be able to tour—but you've had some pretty remarkable national and international tours in the past couple of years. If you want to just give a little overview of where you've been, but if any of those experiences—because you know, we can say like you get this many 1000s or point-million streams per month, and that implies that there are people and you happen to know that there are people around the world, but to go to a different place and see your fans at a place that you've never been before and your music has reached them—

SHAYFER: Yeah, the touring. Well first of all, I love touring. I think it's not for everybody. I know for a fact that some people are just like, I hate this, or It's just a slog. You know, it's a lot. You know, it's exhausting. It just isn't for everybody. And if you love it, if you love performing enough that six-hour-a-day drives, and maybe not the best food or the best sleep is worth it for that hour on stage, and you get fired up and you want to keep going, you want to do it every day. But the ratio of time you're actually doing what you love to getting to the point that you could do the thing you love in front of people is a little bit off. Yeah, so I've toured. I did a national tour opening for Will Wood first, and those were solo gigs. And then, because of that, the booking agency that booked Will took me on as a client, and immediately they were able to get me gigs in Europe, which was amazing. And when I opened for Will, I didn't realize that I had fans that would come to shows, or that were even necessarily eager to see me. I kind of thought the streaming was a little bit of a fluke, like it was on playlists somehow. And those numbers were rising—

PETER: I see.

SHAYFER: —those numbers were rising because they were somehow associated with these playlists. I hadn't quite figured it out yet. But I didn't know it was like a bunch of these folks knew my music and were excited to see me. And that was true in Berlin, and Warsaw, and London, and throughout the UK, and Sydney, Australia, you know, meeting these fans, and realizing the similarities that they had to each other around the world, their interests in literature, and the things that they wanted to talk about. And also looking out and seeing them, and I said this to them onstage—learning that they were very much the reflection of what I was at that age: the way they dress, the clothes they wear, the things that they're interested in. It's the same, you know, albeit at a different time, but it is fundamentally the same. And it's kind of wild to look back and see that like, Oh, this is why this music makes sense to them. But yeah, so I've toured the U.S., I've toured through the EU, and the UK. And I did one show in Australia, and a couple of shows in Canada.

[42:39]

PETER: Well that’s one thing about going into the singer-songwriter life, right, is that you do think about touring, and there are artists, through some combination of talent, but also a lot of luck, who get to do it in their late teens, early 20s and so forth, like at a much younger period—or I'm sorry, a little bit, a little bit younger period of their life—

SHAYFER: Yeah. I’m 900.

PETER: That's true. Spiritually, you are Methuselah. How do you think about the difference? You know, because probably that was something that you thought about when you were starting out. Like, Wouldn't it be great to be able to tour? And you certainly played in different places. But as far as going across the country or going internationally, that's something that's really opened up recently. Is there something that you learned having the benefit of the interceding decades?

SHAYFER: Oh, yeah. Because I think I am so grateful for it. And every, every moment feels like a gift. Every show that I've played feels, first of all, that I've earned it, because I've worked really hard at my craft for a pretty long time. And so I feel really proud of myself. But I think that if it had happened in my 20s, when most people, like you said, when that happens for songwriters when they're younger, I think I'd be much more cavalier about it. With this, I feel like I've done a lot of hard work, I earned it, and it's actually humbling more than it is like, Oh, I'm great at this, you know. I'm more like, I can't believe I get to do this! After all this time and at a time of my life when most people would be hanging it up, or being told to hang it up. Luckily, in my life, no one has ever told me to hang it up. And I've had moments where I've felt like maybe I should, but I love it too much to ever do that. So at this moment, it's just like, from what I've learned through my adult life, you know, my perspective on the importance of doing it right and doing it with my whole heart, and the gratitude I feel, versus it being something that I can feel cocky about or feel like I'm better than anybody else. I think it's different.

[45:01]

PETER: Could you talk a little bit about interacting with the fans? You give very careful attention on platforms like social media, like whenever I’ll check out a video of yours, even when it’s something that has just dropped, like one of these official visualizers, maybe for “Cavalry” was one I was looking at, and looking at the comments, people will be like, “Shayfer’s so cool! He answers our questions and responds to everyone,” so I know that there’s a certain amount of online fan interaction, but I also had the opportunity to see you in Toronto last summer, so I had the chance to see not just your performance, which was outstanding, and the way you connected in terms of what is sometimes called “patter,” you know, setting songs up and connecting with the audience, but then I saw the line of people coming up to get merch, to buy it, you know, to take a little piece of the Shayfer James experience home with them, but also just to talk with you and shake your hand, or get an autograph, or get a selfie, get a picture with you and stuff like that, the experience of meeting these people in real life, as they say?

SHAYFER: What was the question?

PETER: I don't know—you tell me! I'm not real good at this, frankly. I'm not good at this job! So it's one thing to say like, there are people in Berlin listening to music, to go, Wow, these people know the lyrics and so forth. But then when you actually get a chance to interact with them, you know, what's that like? I think I was helping sell merch or set up or something [at the Toronto show]. So I just overheard some of the testimony of kids saying like, This song gave me the strength to have a conversation about coming out, or This was my soundtrack of my first date, or this relationship or whatever. They have these little examples that are huge in terms of what your music has meant in their life. I think you've already said that it was a humbling experience to go out and tour. But is there anything as far as actually meeting some of the people that are driving these numbers?

[47:39]

SHAYFER: I mean, yeah, they're just so lovely! I have yet to meet a fan that isn't just incredibly lovely to talk to, and they share, you know. And I think some are more forthcoming and eager to share their stories than others, obviously. But I think I learn from them the impact that the music actually has. Just seeing stream numbers, [all I know is] Oh, people are listening. But when you hear someone's story, in person, and you see that emotion in their face of how much it meant to them, or like you said, my first date or something like that, you learn the importance of creating. It reminds me of those songs from my childhood, you know, or not even just my childhood—all the time. You know, the things that shape you and shape your experiences: that soundtrack. That I'm that soundtrack for these people is mind-blowing to me.

PETER: Music just hits at such a deep place. It's a line I've seen attributed to Elvis Costello, but I've also seen it attributed to other people. (I like Elvis Costello more than most people, so I usually pretend that he said it, but I have not done the research on it.) The line is Writing about music is like dancing about architecture. So I think by extension, podcasting about music probably falls into a similar trap. It’s not news to say that music affects us at profound depths, you know, that there are people, for example, who would not be persuaded to go to church at any other time of year, but the fact that they get to hear Christmas carols or sing Christmas carols that remind them or take them back. It just operates at these at these places. Along these lines, when you create something and put it out in the world, you necessarily don't have control over what people do with it. There's something in the English teacher biz that we call the intentional fallacy, which is to say [fallaciously, that] the persona or perspective that an author may take in a given poem or play is necessarily what the author intended and necessarily what the author thinks. And so you may put an idea out there, kind of playfully or insincerely, that somebody may take literally, or they may just misconstrue a song entirely. And you’re like, That's not what I meant. But as an artist, you don't have the option of attaching a little 3x5 card to it and saying, like, This is what I meant by this song, right? Like, This is what this song really means. That’s part of the power of art. Having said all that, are there places where you look at how people, or some people, interpret a song, and you're like, Whoa! Wut-oh! I don't know what to do about that! Have you ever felt the need to clarify something or to say, Maybe I won’t play that song for a while?

[51:03]

SHAYFER: Yeah: “Mercy Down.” So I wrote “Mercy Down,” I guess it was probably 2017, I don't know. He Who Shall Not Be Named had recently come into the Office of the President. I wrote it about America at that moment. And there's a bridge part where I talk about a “tyrant on the throne and a clown on every screen.” And what I'm referring to in that is him. And then also the “clown on every screen,” the televisions and social media sort of the zapping our attention, and we're not experiencing things for what they really are, you know, this was also probably the the beginning of the Fake News era, you know, where it was like every—

PETER: “Alternative facts.”

SHAYFER: Yeah, like he was calling things “fake news,” But then, you know, all these, yes, “alternative facts” were bubbling up. We didn't know what was true anymore. And I have this line, “low-grade fever dream,” which was just a phrase that I thought was interesting about how I felt society was existing at the time.

PETER: And something about “telling us to stay at home.”

SHAYFER: Yeah, it's “compelling us to stay at home in this low-grade fever dream.” And so, I stood by that song. And then there's the chorus, I say, “pick your weapons up and throw your mercy down.” I'm not a violent person. I don't advocate for war, I'm anti-war. But so the “weapons” for me have always been love, and empathy and thoughtfulness. But I sometimes believe—

PETER: And probably art too, right?

SHAYFER: And art. Yeah, anything that I feel is creative rather than destructive, but I use sometimes this heavy imagery, you know. It’s just the way it comes out, and I don't want to edit myself too much. So, you know, zoom ahead to the COVID era, where not only were people were, like, I predicted—Oh, oh, he saw it coming!

PETER: Were you Q? Was that you?

SHAYFER: Right, you know, but then I got a message … several times, but one message I remember clearly. A fan was having a conversation with their mother: their mother listened to the song and made the assumption that I was MAGA and that I was anti-vax, that I was of that group. And it was because in the current context, those words meant something different. And it completely changed the perspective of the song—and for me singing it, because suddenly I was thinking about it differently when I was on stage. And I was like, you know, This feels weird singing, because in this new era, in this post-COVID era, these words mean something different. How are they to know that I wrote it six years ago? They don’t! So I had to put it in my in the YouTube video description. It says: I wrote this song in 2017. This is pre-COVID pre-all of this stuff … And I think I even say, I am not pro-Trump. I'm not— any of this stuff … you know? And it shook me a little bit. And so I actually do change the lyrics somewhat when I sing it live now.

PETER: How?

SHAYFER: I'll do it past-tense, and I sort of change the words to make it clear, you know, that I'm not singing about COVID. I’m not anti-vax, I'm not pro-war.

PETER: That’s a relief, because those were going to be my follow-up questions.

SHAYFER: Yeah, exactly.

PETER: Okay. Cool, cool.

[54:50. From original version of “Mercy Down” from HOPE AND A HAND GRENADE (2019) EP by Shayfer James]

Yeah, it’s getting biblical now

Yeah, it’s getting mythical now

You better pick your weapons up

And throw your mercy, throw your mercy down

There’s a tyrant on the throne

And a clown on every screen

Compelling us to stay at home

In this low-grade fever dream

But we’re gathering our strength

We’re becoming less afraid

There is hope for us in

This unholy mess we’ve made

Hey! It’s getting biblical now

[55:53]

JULIA OLFF [pledge break]: Hello, this is Julia Olff, a health educator, a parent of two former students of the alternative high school program Peter led for many years, and someone just fascinated by how humans learn. When Peter first invited listeners to make a monthly contribution to Point of Learning, I signed up right away—easy decision. I knew I would be taken on a stimulating educational journey of ideas, and ways of engaging learners. I’m especially happy to share this episode because I know it was recorded in Shayfer James’ home studio in Jersey City, a city of many cultures I lived in recently and have fond memories of. If I had to pick a favorite episode of Point of Learning—kind of hard to do—I would say that “This Is Radio (Dammit!)” with Bill Siemering, an early broadcaster on National Public Radio, and the recent episode “Of Surpassing Worth,” on the visionary educator Marcus Foster are some of my favorites that have stayed with me. If you appreciate the carefully curated ideas from a wide range of guests that Peter sends out into the world, think about contributing once a month—just what you might spend on a cup of coffee. There’s also a way to make a one-time donation, if you prefer that. Just click the link on the show page. Thanks, and back to the show!

[57:09]

SHAYFER: I think that songwriting is how I learn about myself. That it’s like how I unearth—and I talk about the “shadow work” that the songwriting is for me—I don't know if it's a relatively new term in therapy, but I'm doing the shadow work through music, like I'm digging into the dark, I am learning. I'm learning how to heal, and I'm learning about how I engage with other people and all these things about myself. And self-awareness, which I think is so important—it's such an important thing to learn, and to refine over the course of your life. And I know that self-awareness is tough to teach. It's not something you can just teach somebody to do, and it requires thoughtful learning. And I've found that that's why I urge everyone to create. If you can sing, you should. If you can write a song, you should. It doesn't matter if anybody would ever want to listen to it: that's irrelevant. I think that if nobody listened to my music—and for a while there, for most of the time that I was writing music, very few people did. But that didn't stop me from doing it. And I would never stop doing if everybody who listened went away. Because it's part of my learning process. Like how I learn to be better at being a person, how I learn to communicate, to share my feelings outside of the creative space. And so I think creativity is a huge part of that. A lot of people maybe don't create because they think they shouldn't, or they don't have enough talent. And I remember talking to the students at Project ’79 when we did the songwriting thing, and encouraging this, and I stand by this: if you can, you should create, because you could learn so much about other people and yourself.

[58:55]

PETER: I feel like we were even more radical than that, though. Because we said: Everybody can write.

SHAYFER: Yeah.

PETER: Everybody can sing.

SHAYFER: Yes.

PETER: Now, you won't necessarily cross the street to hear just anybody sing, but there's something that opens up—you know, it's like how some people have hangups about dancing and so forth, but there's something to dancing, to singing that you don't have to do it well to realize some of the benefits of doing it. You're opening yourself up to that, right?

SHAYFER: Yeah. And I am very self-conscious when it comes to something like dancing.

PETER: I’ve noticed, buddy!

SHAYFER: And I have to learn to not be. I have to teach myself not to be, and my admiration for people who aren't, who are comfortable in their bodies enough to just dance in the way that they do. I admire those people because it's a lesson I haven't figured out yet. I haven't learned how to do that.

[59:59]

PETER: Is there anything that you've gotten from taking on, in some song or another, a particular persona that's a little bit more extreme than you would necessarily say something or put something? We were just talking about the example of “weapons,” right? Like, you don't normally talk like that. You don’t go to the barista and say like, Do you have any weapons? I need to cut into this bagel? That’s not your normal—there is a kind of poetry and intensity, a charge to the lyrics and certainly to the music that's different. Is there anything liberating about taking a more extreme stance?

SHAYFER: Yeah, I think so. I love extreme art. I like things feeling visceral, and so I like creating in that way. I like clever things. Frankly, I like dark things. Even though I'm not for violence, I think I've always been interested in how violence and that imagery is woven into lessons and woven into art, whether it be horror films or sci-fi, or basically any art form. I’m interested in that.

PETER: But I think when you're talking about learning something from the process of writing a song, that sometimes there can be maybe a level of artifice that maybe opens something up. I guess what I'm wondering is if it's just like taking a kind of different perspective, more intense than you otherwise would, and then there's something that happens and allows you to explore something, because it's not quite the way you would normally talk about it.

SHAYFER: Yeah, that’s true. And I definitely do that, whether it's intentional or not. I'm not actively thinking about doing it. And so when people started talking about my music online, like on Reddit—I tell the story sometimes when I'm at shows, you know, somebody just tore me apart on Reddit and called me an “Edgelord,” which means, for your daily listeners, somebody who just talks a big game about all this terrible stuff, but really isn’t that—is kind of full of shit. And I was like, Well, yeah. Yeah. Because I don't—I've never killed someone, and I don't want to kill someone! And I don't treat people in some of the ways—when I make my jokes and my sarcasm in my music, I don't actually treat people poorly. I am not a villain. Sometimes people are like, Oh, this is music for villains. I’m like, I am not a villain. I don't know any villains, except the ones that I see on the news, you know? So yeah, it's cool, but it's not intentional. And I can't put it any better than you put it, which is it does give definitely give me access to different things to write that way. But I don't go in with the intention of writing in that way.

[1:03:34]

PETER: I know that you have plenty of friends living who are visual artists, and so because of that, I'm going to say: Who are artists who are no longer living, but visual artists that are interesting to you, or even styles of visual art? Just because you mentioned the visual art that's sometimes an inspiration for you.

SHAYFER: Yeah. My favorite visual artist is Magritte.

PETER: Okay. René Magritte.

SHAYFER: I just, yeah, I could just I could stare at his work all day. I just love it. I love the use of color, and I love surrealism. You know, I don't love all surrealism either, you know. Some of it, I look at and I’m like, This is— What is— What is this? I am not a person that goes to the MoMA and says, “Look how extraordinary this stuff is!” I look at some of it and I'm like, What is— Whose nephew is this that they got their shit on a wall at a museum? This is terrible! It doesn't make any sense to me. Right? So that's not to say like— I have very specific tastes in what I like. I know that art is totally subjective. We just came out of the conversation that If you can make art— Everyone can, and everybody should. But it doesn't mean that I'm going to enjoy it or understand it.

PETER: Of course!

SHAYFER: And I'm sure that those works that I think are ridiculous, somebody stands in front of them and goes, This is life-changing for me. But I love Dalí. I think surrealism is my favorite. But it's probably like 20th-century, that vibe, you know 1900 to like maybe the 1970s. There’s a bunch of artists in there, those two being my favorite. But Magritte is—if I could have art all over my home that I could afford, that's the person I would have the most work from.

[1:05:47]

[VO]: That’s it for today’s show! So if you’re the one hoarding the Magritte’s painting “The Son of Man” in your private collection, I know a worthy artist you could lend it to for a few months! Thanks so much to Shayfer James for sitting down to talk. If you’re thinking you might like to catch him perform live, he just may be coming to a city near you! Throughout April 2024 he’ll be playing Pittsburgh, Columbus, Cleveland, Philly, D.C., Albany (I’m going to that one), Boston, New York City, and then on May 7th he’ll land at the Macbeth in London. For tickets, venues, and dates, visit shayferjames.com/tour, or just click the link in the show notes. Thanks as always to Shayfer James for providing intro and outro—oh, you know that part. If you’d like to hear more Project ’79, the amazing alternative education program referred to several times in this show that is still going strong in its 45th anniversary year, of course I’ve got a full episode for that, from way back in 2018, and it’s linked on the show page. Also linked are the episodes featuring Bill Siemering and Marcus Foster that Julia Olff flagged as two of her faves in her gracious promotional appearance, so check those out if you haven’t yet. Finally, thank you for your support of this show in any way you do it! Hey, have you never rated or reviewed a podcast in your podcast app of choice? May today be the day you find yourself at the Point of Learning! Only takes a second to rate: 5 stars. This podcast, perilously close to its 50th new episode in just seven years, does take a while to produce because it’s written, recorded, edited, mixed, and mastered with love by me here in Sunny Buffalo, New York. I’m Peter Horn and I’ll be back at you soon with the 50th Episode Auracular—that’s right, it’ll be a spectacular, but for your ears, and it will be all about what and how and why we learn. See you then! I mean, talk to you then. (You know what I mean.)

"Of surpassing worth" Transcript (046)

MIRIAM LUCIA ROTH MEISTER: Dr. Marcus Foster was the first black superintendent of a large city school district in the United States, Oakland, California. And he was murdered 50 years ago this month. At that time in 1973, my mom, Dr. Gail Roth Meister, was working as a consultant in Dr. Foster's district. She was 25—at the start of her five-decade career in education. That fall, Dr. Foster gave a back-to-school address to district faculty and staff. You will hear audio of that speech in today's episode. My mom died last year. Her death led to the discovery of this audio in her professional records: a legacy within a legacy. Thanks to that, and the gracious permission of Dr. Foster's family, you're about to hear an inspiring vision of education. It feels just as important today as when he spoke these words a half century ago. May the memory of both these educators be for blessing. My name is Miriam Lucia Roth Meister, and you are at the Point of Learning with my cousin Peter Horn.

[01:43] 

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today's show, Oakland superintendent Dr. Marcus Foster, in his address to district faculty and staff, from 1973:

DR. MARCUS A. FOSTER: You see, what you believe about yourself transfers to children in terms of your attitude: they absorb it, they catch it, the nonverbal communication, they pick it up. So I want all of you to be aware of your personal potency. You’re powerful people! You’re teachers! You’re powerful in the lives of children—at least, potentially you are. Whether you exercise that power or not is up to you.

[VO]: Including so much we could still stand to learn 50 years later—

FOSTER: You see, that’s where we are going to win. We’ll have differences, but as long as we don’t let those differences separate us and pull us apart and tear us apart in a kind of disruptive confrontation—if we can believe in each other and stand on the common ground that children are what we are all about, and that we will do nothing to rob children of an opportunity to learn—that whatever our adult differences are, we’ll work them out as professionals and adults working together. But we will not cause children to suffer while we solve our problems …

[VO]: Plus a special conversation with Foster's biographer, Dr. John P. Spencer.

DR. JOHN P. SPENCER: He inspired people. He was somebody who was capable of really motivating and inspiring making people feel that there was hope.

[03:30]

[VO]: As my cousin Miriam laid out at the top of the show, I wouldn't have access to this recording of Marcus Foster if it weren't for my aunt Gail, and the kind permission of Dr. Foster's family to share it with you. But it's also true that if this tape hadn't been discovered among my aunt's professional records, I probably wouldn't have embarked upon my journey this year of learning as much as I could about Marcus Foster, whose name I had only encountered once or twice during my doctoral studies in Philadelphia—the city where he grew up and spent the lion's share of his professional career.

As a way to set the table for Dr. Foster's remarkable speech, I want to share just a few details that made me add exclamation points to the margins of John P. Spencer's biography, entitled In the Crossfire: Marcus Foster and the Troubled History of American School Reform. This brief intro will be about equal parts biography and list of things I wish educators would do today.

Marcus Foster would have turned 100 this year. Born on March 31st, 1923 in Athens, Georgia, Foster moved when he was very young to Philadelphia with his mother, Alice Johnson Foster, who was a schoolteacher, and his older siblings (Spencer, p. 22). Alice's father had been a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, who had studied Greek and Latin. [*CORRECTION (courtesy of Dr. Marsha Foster): There were two prominent AME ministers named William Decker Johnson who made important contributions in the late 19th and early 20th century. Because they shared the same name, they are sometimes confused. Although the other William Decker Johnson (1869-1936) did serve as the 42nd Bishop of the AME Church, Alice Johnson Foster's father—Marcus Foster's grandfather—William Decker Johnson was born free in Maryland in 1842. A graduate of Lincoln University who earned his A.B. in 1868, his A.M. in 1871 and his D.D. in 1880, he held appointments in Washington, D.C., Florida, and Georgia, serving as a Methodist minister for more than 33 years. From 1884 to 1896, Dr. Johnson served as Commissioner and Education Secretary for the AME Church. In 1904 he became president of Allen University in Columbia, South Carolina, serving until 1908. He and his family returned to Athens, Georgia, where he died in 1909.] Perhaps this is why Alice gave Marcus the middle name "Aurelius" (p. 28), after the Stoic philosopher and last emperor of the Pax Romana. The value of education and the life of the mind ran deep in Foster's family, and Alice did whatever she could to encourage her children's intellectual development, from supervising their homework to enrolling young Marcus in elocution lessons (p. 30). But also, Marcus was apparently as comfortable in the streets of South Philly as he was competent in its public school classrooms (p. 30). He loved dancing, zoot suits, and big band music—Billy Strayhorn's hit song "Take the A-Train" was a favorite, according to one of Foster's high school friends [email from Spencer to Horn]—and more than once in his youth Marcus settled neighborhood turf battles by winning fistfights (p. 31).

Later, as a teacher and administrator, he earned a reputation as a superb negotiator who took the time to understand where kids, teachers, parents, school board members, business leaders, and other community members, to name a few constituencies, were coming from. In the late 1950s and 1960s at schools like Dunbar Elementary School in North Philadelphia, Foster and other educators developed pilot projects that sought to reverse a legacy of racial discrimination.

[They believed that] student achievement was shaped both by the social and cultural capital that parents pass on to their children and by the attitudes, instructional approaches, and resources the children encounter in school (pp. 12-13).

For example, while Foster was principal of Dunbar Elementary, money from the Ford Foundation enabled parent activist Eloise Holmes to work on a full-time basis as school-community coordinator. In the fall of 1960, Holmes organized the neighborhood one block at a time, setting up a network of 56 block captains who served as liaisons between the school and the Dunbar families who resided there (p. 77). Foster believed that if academic improvement was going to happen in struggling schools, he needed  to work on relationships, not only within the school, but between the school and its parents and surrounding community (p. 114).

In 1963, when Foster was 40, he was assigned to the Catto School, one of two special schools in Philadelphia where the district concentrated its male disciplinary cases. Most of the students were emotionally disturbed and/or had serious family problems. All of the students were black (p. 95). Described by some in the district as a "cesspool," the school was in dire need of a turnaround, so Foster hit the ground learning. He initiated genuine dialogue at Catto about big issues like philosophy, curriculum, and the approach to discipline. He joked that he could not change teacher attitudes and expectations "simply by printing memos and telling everybody to 'Please be loving and have high expectations'"—so he instituted weekly staff meetings to talk it out. He welcomed, even demanded, input and participation from all parties. He tried to create a climate "where disagreements could be aired and positions and assumptions challenged." (p. 114) Foster knew that habits were "stronger than rational arguments," but he successfully challenged the staff to take greater responsibility for the quality of education at the school: together they produced a four-page checklist for evaluating and improving their own performance. (p. 115) Once again, he focused on school-community relations, for example, recruiting University of Pennsylvania students to do five-week stints as language arts tutors as he focused on literacy (p. 120). When he met with new parents for an intake interview, he didn't stress rules or make threats; rather he used the first meeting to "learn as much as possible about the boy, the parents, the community, the home, and the perception of the family regarding the reason for the assignment. Considerable time was spent in listening." (p. 121) He wanted to show parents that the staff cared about their child's development, and to give them a way to participate in the school without feeling stigmatized. To get the ball rolling, he took a five-dollar contribution and signed them up for a new organization called Friends of Catto! (p. 121) Later, as superintendent of Oakland, he would found the Oakland Education Institute: same purpose, on a larger scale, to raise auxiliary funds to support students. That organization turns 50 this year as the Marcus Foster Education Institute.

When he was appointed in 1966 to serve as principal of Simon Gratz HS in North Philadelphia, the school had a reputation as perhaps the most troubled in the district. As Foster pushed for higher academic expectations and achievement, he allowed parents and students to join teachers in writing a more relevant curriculum, and most dramatically, he responded to parents' anger about overcrowding by leading a successful confrontation with the school board and the city over expansion of the school's facilities. After a frustrating failure to achieve their goals through negotiation, Foster and some six thousand citizens descended on a school board meeting by the busload, peacefully forcing the board and the city to seize fourteen white-owned homes under eminent domain so that thousands of black students might enjoy adequate school facilities (p. 137).

Foster received the prestigious Philadelphia Award in 1969 as someone who had made formidable contributions to the city, one of the first African Americans to be so recognized. I could go on for a while—we haven't even gotten to Foster's historic superintendency in Oakland, California, which began in 1970—but by this point, I think you've got the sense that this man was someone  phenomenal, and you're likely quite eager to hear from him. And so, from the archives of Dr. Gail Roth Meister, and with permission from Dr. Marsha Foster, here is one of the last public speeches by Dr. Marcus A. Foster, the superintendent's Back-to-School Address for Oakland faculty and staff from the fall of 1973!

[11:04]

SUPERINTENDENT MARCUS A. FOSTER: We are facing a year of challenge. And today, I would like to touch on three major themes. The first: I would like to talk to you a little bit about the events of this summer. While you were away, some of you others stayed on and never did take a break all summer. I’d like to bring you up to date on those events and what transpired. And then I would like to talk to you about the factors in, and the aspects of the momentum we have achieved over the three years. Then the third point I’d like to make deals with the ingredients that will go into making the 1973-74 school year a pivotal one in our history.

All of you are aware that because of [California State Senate Bill] 90, we were able to mount an outstanding summer program. Some of these schools were looking at the opportunities that are inherent in the primary unit/middle school/upper school concept, the “K triple four.” And I was glad that some of you spent time looking at those possibilities, because in the primary unit, the K-4 situation, we can specialize in dealing with children at that end of the educational spectrum, where teachers can become expert in working with little ones in the initial phases of reading skills and quantitative thinking. There’s much to be said  about working with that one facet of the primary end of the educational spectrum. I know that I’ve taught right through the grades, starting with Grade 3 and right through up until high school and into college. And I know that even in elementary school, there’s a difference when you’re dealing with youngsters in Grades 1, 2, 3, and 4, and when you get them in 5 and 6. And if children who are grouped together at the lower end are housed together, those teachers become specialists, and give them a good start that points them in a direction that we don’t spend millions of dollars for remediation, but we deal with preventive measures in the very beginning. In the primary unit, you see, we conceive of that as continuous progress. And we don’t talk about “grades,” we talk about “years.” And each youngster has to complete a set of operational skills. And when he is to do what was expected at the end of four, whether he takes four years, or whether he takes five or six, that is conceived of as progress for each of those youngsters, because they progress at a different rate.

And we won’t see the spectacle of children emerging at the secondary level as, for all practical purposes, non-readers. We’ll have these multiple checkpoints at the primary unit. And then when they get into the middle school, instead of having what we have in many places today around the country—a kind of watered-down high school for the junior high school—we will have a middle school that addresses the needs of pre-adolescents. And there we can deal with those problems of growing and understanding self, and [students’] relationship to each other and to the community. All of that has to be sorted out. And the middle school offers that opportunity. And then every high school principal knows that he prefers to have his ninth grade with him in a four-year high school rather than coming from a number of feeder schools, where you have to begin there to build for the sophomore year. So I think that that configuration offers some hope.

I was glad that people spent time this summer, looking at the inherent possibility in the “K triple 4” arrangement. We won’t plunge into it all at once, but I do know that we need to have these operational skills that we talk about that children should master before they move on. Because the accumulative effect of not achieving and not mastering a skill is damaging down the line. When a youngster is unable to cope, then he does what anyone would do in a failing situation: He walks away from it, [so] he doesn’t see himself daily confronted with a situation that proves that he’s inadequate. So what I’m talking about here is we have a heavy challenge to give them a good start and then sustain that all the way along the line.

[15:51]

[At the Catto Disciplinary School in Philadelphia] I had a youngster there who had seen his father shoot his mother to death. And he was a little boy about nine years old. And he started beating up the other kids. And they sent him to me. And he came there—he was so fragile—and I had these big youngsters, and they’re 18. And he was just a baby compared to them. I noticed that he liked to hang around the cafeteria. And I said to that very understanding cafeteria person, the dietician, “I wonder if you’ll let this little fella stay in the kitchen and give him something useful to do.” And she did that. And that went on for a couple of days. And one day, I got to school early. And there was this little fella, standing at the subway, 7:30 in the morning, waiting for this cafeteria worker to come out, so he could take her pocketbook and walk to school with her. You don’t have to be a psychiatrist to know what was happening. And then after she worked with him a while I said, “How about pushing him out of the nest, just for one period a day, and let him run right back in?” She said, “Okay.” She pushed him out, he ran right back, then we extended the period. Out three or four months, he was back in school, doing well. We never heard from him again. Now it wasn’t the counselor who got through that boy, it wasn’t the principal that got through—it was a perceptive cafeteria worker who understood children and cared about them. And I say this is so critical, because you know the importance of the teacher in the life of a child.

The teacher has a critical role in the life of the child. You remember [William W.] Purkey’s book on Self Concept and School Achievement [1970]. Purkey points out that the child’s self-concept begins to form in the home setting, where the parent picks the little one up and coddles him and talks to him and makes him feel wanted as a part of the family. But when he moves out from the family, the next most important person in his life is a teacher in helping to shape his self-concept. And Purkey indicates that these little children come to us after having their experience at home, and a family. Some have loved them and supported them; others have rejected them. But whatever they’ve done, every child comes to us with a kind of invisible tag attached to his sleeve. And one tag may say damaged goods—reduced in value. Another tag may say of surpassing worth—priceless. And whatever we do, we write on those tags. What you do as a teacher, what I do as superintendent, what everyone does out here, as cafeteria workers and secretaries and all the rest, you are writing another line on that tag! And it might say further damaged—further reduced in value—discarded. It might say increased in value—priceless. See, what we write on that tag is important. In relation to the self-concept, before you can help children build a positive self-concept, you yourself have to have a pretty good self-concept of your own capability. [Applause]

And the challenge is to operate our schools and school system so that they are ego-supporting for everybody in the institution. Teachers have to feel that they’re doing a good job, and principals have to say to them, “Hey, baby, that was great!” (You may not say it quite that way!) [Laughter.] But somehow it has to be conveyed to teachers that You’re doing fine! You took that little fella who was there and you stretched him! Sometimes you have to say to the principal—and watch him faint—“Wow, that was a good faculty meeting!” And he’ll faint dead away, feeling too he needs approbation! To that parent that wanders in off the street: “My, I’m glad you came! Glad to see you, dear! Sit down. Tell me about Johnny. I want to learn something from you.” Everybody associated with the institution has to feel better for having been a member of that institution. But you have to have a positive image of yourself as Teacher, because that’s reflected in your attitude. If you don’t feel you’re somebody [it’s hard to] stand in front of a class and say, “Boys and girls, here it is! I’m gonna lay it on you! Get ready! I’m gonna make you glad you came to school today!” and then whip out a good lesson, and Wow! Did we do it? It has to be at that level of enthusiasm. And if it doesn’t get to that level— Teachers who come to school tired when they get there, it’s a lost day. It’s a lost day.

Teaching is something you’ve got to work at. If at the very moment that you’re teaching, if what you are saying and doing is not the most important thing in your life at that time, it won’t be important for children! So I’m saying that we have to work at that, friends. And you are here. There are many of our brothers and sisters who have elected to be elsewhere, but you—those in this auditorium, who could get this concept that I’m talking about—can revolutionize this system, can turn it around! You who are in this audience, and the other brothers and sisters out there in the street, doing something else, they will come along. Because you will be getting results. You see, what you believe about yourself transfers to children in terms of your attitude: they absorb it, they catch it, the nonverbal communication, they pick it up. So I want all of you to be aware of your personal potency. You’re powerful people! You’re teachers, you’re secretaries—whatever your role is, you’re powerful in the lives of children—at least, potentially you are. Whether you exercise that power or not is up to you. See, your attitude, and then the atmosphere that you develop around you is tied up with your self-concept and the concept of those children sitting in front of you.

[22:33]

And I’d just like to give you six points that you ought to think about as they relate to the climate or the atmosphere for building a strong self-concept on the part of those children sitting in front of you. Now what do they need?

1.) They need an atmosphere that’s challenging. I put that first. You see, some people hear me talking about love, and the role of success in education and finding opportunities for children to have success—and they think that I’m talking about watering down the program! One of the first things that’s needed if you’re going to build a strong self-concept is a challenge for the children, with high academic expectations. But closely related to a challenge is the word relevance. See, the challenge works if what you’re doing is relevant to the lives of the children and they see sense in it, and they want to do it and they’ll work at it hard, if you can relate it to their lives in a meaningful way. But: challenge and relevance, right together, those two. Speaking of challenge, let me take you back to a school where I was principal. I had a department head who was one of the brightest fellows I’ve ever known. His degree was in physics—science department. And he used to put in his book requisition and always have a 50% overrun. So I went to him one day, and I put my finger in his tie. I said, “Mr. So-and-So, you don’t love my children!” And he almost fainted. He said, “What do you mean, Marc? What do you mean?” I said, “You don’t love my children, because you are assuming they can’t be taught to take care of their books! You’re building in 50% extra so that you don’t have to teach the children how to take care of things and hold them accountable. You don’t love them! I’m talking about challenging them to be accountable for those books. And I’m not going to give you 50% more. You get those books back. I’m saying that’s the challenge. And once you challenge children, they understand it, and they respond to it. It contributes to their self-concept. They walk taller. They feel prouder of what they’ve done.” Of course, after saying that, he said, “Well, Marc, I guess maybe I shouldn’t stay here.” I said, “I think you may be right,” and we helped him move on to another school. He was happier and we were happier. But the challenge has to be there. And it’s part of the self-concept. So we’re talking about academic achievement. But relevance. That’s [point] one.

2.) If you’re going to build an atmosphere, supportive of the ego of little children, big children, wherever you’re dealing with them, it has to be an atmosphere of freedom. There must be some opportunity to make a choice. How can you build your own strength and confidence in your ability to decide and do things, if you never get a chance to make a real decision? There has to be opportunity for choice—some freedom—because if one accepts the standards, goals and objectives of another and substitutes them for his own, he will never evolve into a strong personality, able to set goals and standards for himself. So you’ve got to have freedom there.

3.) You have to have respect. Respect permeates the whole atmosphere—respect for each other. I go to a school and I see teachers walk down the hall and not even speak to each other. And then when they get in, they tell the children, “Always say ‘Good morning!’” [Laughter and applause.] Respect is something that’s caught in the atmosphere of a school. And children catch it from teachers: the way you relate to each other, the way you relate to those little ones. There has to be an atmosphere where the worth and dignity of each student is paramount. We have to be aware of the student’s personal feelings. I remember reading in the little book[i] dealing with self-concept: A fellow was telling the psychiatrist why he couldn’t relate to an English teacher—couldn’t relate to her. He said, “Because my name is Cribbage. When came to my name, she called me ‘cabbage’ and laughed.” People do that to children. It’s funny. And his name is the most precious thing he owns! It goes on his checks; it will be with him all his life. And she thought it was cute to call Cribbage “cabbage.” And this kid was in graduate school and still remembered that with some distaste and displeasure. Respect!

4.) Another ingredient that has to be there: if the climate is going to be ego-supporting, it has to be one of warmth: a psychologically safe and supportive situation. Psychologically safe. I’ve told some of you about that story: One of my excellent first-grade teachers—some of the principals know how you do this; you take your best teachers and put them right next to the office, so if you get visitors, you just duck in that room and then out, see! [Laughter.] But [here was this excellent teacher] next door to my office. And I walk into her room one day. And there she is with a bulletin board, beautiful bulletin board, blue background with little white waves going this way. And on the crest of each wave was a little ship with a child’s name on it. And the first row said we are sailing. The second row said we are drifting. And the third row said we are sinking! And when I walked into that classroom, I said, “Listen”—I won’t use her name; you might know her—“Listen, dear! What are you doing to my precious little ones? This is the first grade! How do you think they feel coming in every day seeing it publicly proclaimed that their little ship has capsized? How do you think they feel about that? And she drew herself to her full height and said, “Well, Dr. Foster, these children have an appraisal of their capabilities. They have to know that they can’t do everything. In life, they have to face failure.” I said, “Well, wait a minute. I’ll tell you what, dear. You take the bulletin board down, because I’m the principal and I said so. And later on, you may understand why, but take it down.” Now I was there six years in that school and before I left, she came to me and said, “Marc, I want to thank you for the lesson you taught me.” See, unwittingly, we injure children! I’m saying that the warmth includes a psychologically safe environment where you don’t do violence to a child by proclaiming his little ship has sunk. [Another example:] Reading things that they have where each time a child reads a book, you put a little back of a book with his name, and the little shelf comes out like that [to a certain distance]. And then here’s a little boy who has read his first whole book, the first whole book he has read in his life! There should be rejoicing in heaven, dancing in the street! He’s read a book! He’s read a book! But his little book goes up there next this other kid [with many books], his one book on the shelf. And there he is psychologically crippled, not proud of having read, but ashamed that his bookshelf didn’t go out as far. I’m saying, these are the kinds of things that good teachers do to children—I’m not talking about bad teachers! Good teachers hurt children unwittingly. In everything we do, when we establish an atmosphere of warmth, we have to examine it to see that it’s ego-supporting.

5.) The next one I would go to is control. Control. If you’re going to have an ego-supporting environment, it has to be one that you exercise some control in. Firm guidance produces more self-esteem than permissiveness. Studies have shown that—the literature is replete with children who have been allowed to drift. You see, when you set limits on behavior, and you have cooperatively worked on those limits, that’s another way of saying to the child, I care about you. I care enough about you to help you in a social situation. I care about you as a person. I care about what you do. I care enough if you’re wrong to correct you. Control has to be present. In every classroom, there’s got to be an ego-supporting environment. Control is related to the way one teaches. When you come into the room, you’ve got to be prepared to teach! I come in [some] rooms, I see the teacher fumbling around. Five, ten minutes of the period have gone by—she’s getting her game together. And before you know it, the period’s over and she still hasn’t got her game together! Now I say “she”; could be “he”—but you gotta be ready! That’s what control is all about. I remember when I taught, I used to have a five-minute exercise those children had to do when they hit the door. And they got five minutes to do it. And if they didn’t get it: “See me later!” But you had some way of getting them in there in a hurry to do useful work, and hold them accountable. But you’ve got to be ready to teach. Control is lost when one is fumbling for what to do next. Children draw strength from your ability to move from one subject to the other with assurance. So when I talk about control, I’m not talking only about suppressing bad behavior that tends to disrupt the class and interferes with other people’s opportunity to learn. I’m talking about teaching in such a way that it doesn’t escalate to that! And the control is tied up in what is being taught and the way it’s being taught.

6.) And the last one I would mention: any ego-supporting environment has to be one that affords chances for success. Now, if I had to pick out one, I guess that would be it. [If you don’t help] children have a successful experience—who learns anything about improving his ego through failure? I don’t know that failure has ever helped anyone. And certainly if when you’re teaching, you’ve ever reached the point where over 50% of your folks are failing, you’re doing something wrong! It has to be an environment where children can succeed. If I had the time, I would cite a series of studies that were done around blame and praise to see what got the best results. “Work harder! You’re not working as hard as you should!” Or saying, “You did that fine, Johnny. Now let’s go to the next—” Every study I’ve ever looked at indicates that praise accomplishes more than blame. And we have to know how to use it appropriately: you don’t praise him for sloppy work. It’s better to praise for a minute, significant accomplishment rather than use “It’s nice.” “That’s good, that's nice.” But to pick out [something specific]: “You learned how to find a common denominator by inspection. That was beautiful!” Be specific. And then the other thing they said—just mundane stuff that all you good teachers know about—they said that even writing comments on the child’s written work, comments of encouragement, produced a significant improvement in self-concept and achievement. And some of us take the papers and [toss them] right in the round file. And everybody’s done it. When you don’t have a chance to mark the papers, you come in one day and say, “Oh, these papers were so poor this week that I’m gonna give you a break. I’m not even gonna mark them!” [Laughter.] I’m not gonna ask you to raise your hand how many of you have done this! [Laughter.] And what I’ve been doing for the last few minutes is review some of the conditions that have to exist in your classroom, in your school building, and yes, in the school system if people are going to feel supported. I believe that we have in Oakland some of the finest teachers you can find anywhere. I believe that sincerely. I do. I know that we have instructional assistants who have been invaluable in helping us do our job more effectively. All I’m saying: the challenge to us is to make sure we communicate to the students and to their parents that we care. And we do that by the way we teach them.

[36:39]

Our test scores, just a word about it. In Grade 1, we’ve held our above-grade-level reading average that we achieved in ‘71-‘72. In addition, you the primary teachers, have succeeded in reducing the percentage of pupils scoring at the bottom quartile [based] on national norms. You reduced that by 5%. So you held [the score] in the primary [level], but you also reached back and got those children that were way below and brought them up out of that last quartile. At the 6th -grade level, city-wide reading and arithmetic scores were up by one month, at both median and first-quartile level. And this shows effective teaching and programs, because across the state, the 6th-grade [scores] went down. But in Oakland, they didn’t go down. They held their own, and in some cases went up. That’s an accomplishment! In the 12th grade, while the state was going down at the 12th-grade level, Oakland held its own. So I’m saying that all along the line, you as teachers who are out there battling, attempting new programs, trying new strategies, can take a sense of justifiable pride in your accomplishments. Because the scores prove that the movement is in the right direction. We’re not where we want to be, not by a long shot. But we’re moving in the direction we want to go. And it’s because of you and your efforts. Now, finally, we have a year before us that should be encouraging to all of us. Because we have some resources at our disposal that we haven’t had before, to help us in our gigantic effort to swim upstream, to swim against the current. And some of those things we have right at our fingertips now. We’ve learned how to harness the community energy and concern. We proved that in the quake-safe bond election. So we can build on that, as we begin to bring the community even more into the arena of the school. We’re learning a better utilization of our resources. And we have more resources. We’re going to be able to lower class sizes, modestly. We going to improve the money set aside for books and supplies, improve the counseling and nursing ratios. We’re restructuring the whole early childhood education program. Every high school now has a full-time activity coordinator. And of course, we have a Board of Education that is courageous, [seeking] to undertake new ways of approaching learning problems. We have more dollars for manpower and equipment, for maintenance—almost half a million dollars, we are ready to put into trying to refurbish our buildings. One third of our buildings that are not quake safe, we have a chance now to build anew and get fresh curriculum input in the new facility. We have half of our schools receiving extra money to help children who have learning disabilities. And our number of alternative programs are growing steadily. From one or two, now we have almost a dozen in operation. And one of the groups that’s in the forefront of helping us plan these as a group named Choice that looks for alternative ways of learning. But the secret ingredient—and it’s not too secret—that we have that’s going to do it for us is the professional skill and the dedication of each member of our staff, certificated and classified. You see, that’s where we are going to win. We’ll have differences, but as long as we don’t let those differences separate us and pull us apart and tear us apart in a kind of disruptive confrontation—if we can believe in each other and stand on the common ground that children are what we are all about, and that we will do nothing to rob children of an opportunity to learn—that whatever our adult differences are, we’ll work them out as professionals and adults and as classified folks working together. But we will not cause children to suffer while we solve our problems, because we are determined that those little tags that they brought to us will never have written on them reduced in value—cheap, cheap—reduced in value, that our little children, because they’ve come to Oakland public school, because they’ve met you, and have dealt with the schools across the city, will have on their little tags of surpassing worth—increased in value. Thank you.

[41:35] 

[VO]: Two days before Thanksgiving 2023, I spoke over Zoom with historian John P. Spencer, who published in 2012 the definitive Foster biography In the Crossfire: Marcus Foster and the Troubled History of American School Reform. Professor Spencer, who serves as Chair of the Department of Education at Ursinus College, said that his growing interest in Foster transformed the doctoral dissertation on the history of Oakland schools that he was writing when he was in graduate school in the 1990s. This was a moment when scholars were doing a lot of work on the history of how U.S. cities had changed in mid-20th century.

SPENCER: A lot of it was focused on economic issues, jobs, and housing. There really wasn't much focus on schools. So I had an idea to write a dissertation and then turn it into a book about the transformation of Oakland from the ‘40s through the ‘70s, with the Great Migration of African Americans out of the South and into cities in the North and the West Coast, and the movement of jobs out of cities, to suburbs and elsewhere, and all the forces that created what came to be called the “urban crisis.” I was focusing on Oakland and I encountered Foster as part of that research, and the chapter about Foster was going to be the last chapter in my imagined book about Oakland. And then I was interviewing people along the way, doing oral history interviews, and people were so compelled by Foster and spoke so movingly about him and the impact that he had that I just shifted the focus to make it a more of a biographical project that would follow him from Philadelphia to Oakland. And so now most of the story would be set in Philadelphia, with him as the the focus of it. And I was both interested in him as a figure and the specifics of his career and the work he did, but also how that work showed challenges and developments in American education more generally. I kept finding him really dealing with all the big issues along the way in different capacities as a principal, and eventually, as a superintendent.

[43:58] 

[VO]: The night before we spoke, Spencer had listened to the speech you just heard, so I asked what stood out to him.

SPENCER: Well, in a very simple way, one thing that stood out to me after not having listened to any speech of his for quite some time—because you know, the book was published over 10 years ago—it's just the passion and the the intensity of that speech. It really doesn't let up, you know? He's just incredibly passionate from start to finish of that recording. This is really someone that you would would be paying attention to in a powerful way.

HORN: Passionate, and also funny, you know, that was the thing. I mean, that's an aspect of his charisma, of his charm as well that you can just feel, and you can hear it. You can hear people responding. At one point there's an audible “Right on!” after one of the things that he says, but the laughter and that kind of cadence, the cadence of his speaking, of what points he chooses to make when—there's a there's a real sense of the rapport that's literally audible!

SPENCER: Yeah, I think the other thing is just the really powerful attention to and concern for children: their perspective, the way they experience school, the way that something that might seem like a joke or a small thing to an adult, to a teacher, could really have damaging impact on on a child's sense of well-being or confidence. And I think that was just a signature trait of his, the feeling that he had for the students. They were the focus; they were the center. And, you know, a key theme in the research I did, and that I argue and emphasize in the book, is: that period and his career and also the period in which it really kind of developed—the ‘60s, the Civil Rights era—this rise of an insistence that the schools needed to do better for the students, that there was this tendency to shrug shoulders and throw up your hands and say, “Well, what can you do? Look at these neighborhoods, look at these families, look at these kids, look at all the problems!” The focus on holding schools accountable since No Child Left Behind was passed in 2002 and the publishing of test scores, and the the school report cards for schools—not for students, but for schools—and the declaration of schools as failing and so forth: that impulse to hold schools and educators accountable, I argue in the book that it in some ways took on a kind of one-sided focus on only the schools, and I think one lesson of Foster's career is that the schools can't do it alone and shouldn't be expected to do it alone. And to single them out in that way is counterproductive. But the other side of the coin is this insistence that schools need to do better by children; they need to take responsibility for ensuring that children have a positive experience and successful experience. And I think you really hear that in the speech, that he's urging the teachers to be responsible for those things, for ensuring that they're helping their students and not inadvertently harming them in ways that they may not even be aware of.

[48:21] 

SPENCER: I found Foster's story to have to have two kind of intertwined themes that are somewhat in tension with each other. One is this rise of an insistence on accountability and on schools serving their families and their students and not making excuses for low achievement. And really treating the students well, believing in them, holding high expectations of them. It's striking in the speech that he mentioned that it needs to be challenging; we need high academic expectations. So there's that thread that I suggest in the book anticipated later emphases in policy on accountability. And I argue that it wasn't just George W. Bush and Texas and the forces that led immediately to No Child Left Behind around the turn of the 21st century. But it really went back further to the ‘60s and the Civil Rights era and the work of Black educators like Foster who pushed schools to take responsibility for the learning of the students. But then the other thread is that he also took a step back and had a very broad view of what needed to happen in order for the schools to improve. It wasn't just holding teachers and educators accountable. It was also providing more resources. It was political leaders. It was taxpayers. It was national policy and state policy. And I think that part got lost in the reform era, you know, from around well, from the No Child Left Behind, arguably toward the present, especially around 2010-2012, when I was finishing the book, that—

HORN: Race to the Top—

SPENCER: Yeah, Race to the Top and the documentary Waiting for Superman, which I discussed in the epilogue [of In the Crossfire]. There really was this focus on teachers and teacher unions and schools that were failing and dropout factories. And while all of that has truth to it, and there is that thread of schools needing to take more responsibility, they're embedded in a larger system of inequality and economic dislocation. [Schools] are powerful, important institutions. But as shapers of people's opportunities and economic situation, they are one of many forces and they cannot transcend the economic trends in which they're embedded. And so if the cities are struggling, and the neighborhoods are struggling, and there's high unemployment, and all kinds of problems outside of the schools, that's going to affect what happens in the schools. And so it's important to take a well-rounded view of those things. And so I really appreciated that Foster was always attuned to the complexity and never oversimplified the problem. He managed to make people feel hope and inspire them and push them, without it seeming that he was scapegoating them, or turning them into the villain. And that's what I hear in the speech, I hear him really pushing the teachers to be positive agents of change for students and for education, without vilifying them, without chastising them. It's more of a quality of trying to lift everybody up. And I that was something very special and valuable, I think, that I was thinking about as I listened to that speech.

[52:07]

HORN: Going back to your idea of really valuing students in the mix, here's somebody speaking who has role competence as a principal himself, as a teacher himself, as a district administrator himself who is not the superintendent. I mean, he understands how hard this is, and what roles people need to play, because he's played those roles at different levels in the system. And so listening to somebody who really understands that from the inside, as opposed to—this is one of the things that you mentioned in your epilogue—the moment where it was very popular to bring people in from other fields who had no experience in education to be the “CEO” of a district and say, “We're gonna run this like a business and get ‘er done and do all these things!” But these are people who don't have an insight or understanding of what's involved at each of these places. It's a remarkable font of experience that he brings to the words and what he's suggesting, and how he's able to sell it for people who know that he's been there that he's been in those shoes.

SPENCER: Yeah, absolutely. He had lived the experiences that the students that he was serving were living; he had a visceral feel for their lives, for their situation. He had been an elementary school teacher, he had taught kids to read, he had been a principal of an elementary school, principal of a high school. He had worked every day in schools and recognized the complexity of the job. And that really, I think, was something that shaped his very rounded, complex view of of the issues that he refused to oversimplify them.

[54:09]

Toward the end of our conversation, Professor Spencer said he's often asked about what Dr. Foster might think about U.S. education today.

SPENCER: I felt it when I was writing it, and I feel that it's kind of the answer to what Foster would think now or what the legacy is: On the one hand, I do think it's an uplifting and inspiring story in terms of the impacts he was able to make, what one person was able to do in education, the power that the people felt from him—and I think you hear that in the speech. And in particular, I think as an historian, one of the things that I am struck by is that there really is change over time. It's a different conversation now than it was in 1962 or 1968—times in his career. I think he and others of his generation of educators, especially Black education leaders, changed the conversation about public education in this country. And it no longer was acceptable to do and say things that were very common in that in that earlier era. The racism was just blatant and palpable! And the conversation around high expectations and believing that all children can learn, and holding schools accountable for that: I think that that is a real contribution of Foster and in his era, and it's important not to forget that. And then there's the depressing side, which is that so many of the problems are so familiar. There's so much that is still not right about public education and inequities. And that part of it would be, I'm sure, distressing to Foster, if he knew how deep those problems remained. But I think it's always important to remember that even though those problems are still so serious that there has been change and evolution in the picture of education, and he was part of that.

[56:35] 

Marcus Foster's life was cut tragically short 50 years ago, on November 6th, 1973, by a hail of shotgun pellets and cyanide-filled bullets fired by members of the Symbionese Liberation Army, a leftist group that became infamous several months later for kidnapping publishing heiress Patty Hearst. The SLA had tragically misjudged Foster's role as the first African American leader of the Oakland Schools, believing that he must be a puppet of the white power structure and that by killing him, they could recruit more people to their cause. Instead, Foster was deeply mourned on both coasts, with thousands attending memorial services in Philadelphia as well as Oakland.

A challenge for any memorial, for any eulogy, is paying tribute to a whole life in relatively few words. With respect to my late aunt, Gail Roth Meister, I want to say that I'm profoundly grateful for the ways she continues to teach me. We never discussed her work with Dr. Foster during the many conversations she and I had about schools and effective approaches to education—which is probably not so odd, given that she finished working for the Oakland district two years before I was born—but I'm so glad to have this particular fire kindled now. She worked for dozens of other districts, schools of all kinds, and other education organizations in the decades that followed, but one project more than any other has come to mind in these weeks of new strife in the mid-East, an area of the world she visited many times and felt deeply connected to as a devout Jew. This was about 6 years ago, and the project was a collaboration she was helping to support for kids at three middle schools in the Philadelphia area: one Catholic, one Jewish, and one Muslim day school. It used writing as a means for youth development and interfaith learning, and Aunt Gail would just light up when she talked about its possibilities.

[58:42]

That's it for today's special episode! Thanks so much to Professor Spencer, and to Mr. Sam Davis and Dr. Denise Saddler of the Oakland Unified School District. Special thanks to the family of Dr. Foster, including Dr. Marsha Foster, who is working to republish her father's 1971 book Making Schools Work, which will be back in print next year with a new foreword that includes the legacy of her mother Albertine, who was also an educator. Much gratitude to my big brother John Horn, whose "Take the A-Train" was recorded expressly and lovingly for this episode. Intro and outro music provided as always by Shayfer James. Thanks finally to you, for listening, rating, reviewing, and supporting Point of Learning any way you can. I'm guessing you know a teacher or school leader who would be deeply moved by Dr. Foster's words—please go ahead and share it up!

Except for the words about Marcus Foster's life and career that I borrowed from Professor Spencer—see transcript for citation details—this episode of Point of Learning was written, edited, mixed, and mastered by me, here in Sunny Buffalo, New York. I'm Peter Horn, and I'll be back as soon as I can with another episode all about what and how and why we learn. See you then!

Excellence Under Pressure Transcript (045)

PHILLIP ELLIS: Greetings, fellow listeners! My name is Philip Ellis, and you are at the Point of Learning with my good friend Peter Horn. Pete and I just finished our one-year term as inaugural fellows in Democratic and Civic Engagement at the University of Pennsylvania. At our last in-person meeting in Philly, I introduced Pete to another good friend of mine, Coach John Havlik, who's a retired Navy SEAL and West Virginia University Hall of Fame athlete. I'm a huge fan of Coach. It's not often that you find somebody who's so accomplished in life, yet so down to earth. He just finished his doctoral dissertation, which is a fascinating study on how elite performers manage stress that he and Pete will be discussing in this episode. Coach has a lot of great wisdom to share, so I hope you enjoy the show!

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today’s show, retired Navy SEAL Captain John Havlik punctures Hollywood stereotypes about Navy SEALs.

JOHN HAVLIK: We’re just a bunch of guys who go to work every day. We have a unique mission and we train hard for it. And we're ready to act when called upon.

[VO]: A Hall of Fame competitive swimmer himself, Havlik recently interviewed U.S. National Team swimmers to study how they managed stress:

HAVLIK: Positive self-talk was huge. Swimmers often commented that “You know, when you get up on the block to race, physically, almost all of you have done the same thing to get there. Now it's really about the mental side: who wants to win the most.” And that's really the difference between those that are up on the podium from those that aren't on the podium.

[VO]: He also interviewed retired Navy SEALs with experience totaling 40 deployments over 139 years of honorable service.

HAVLIK: You train and work with your fellow operators. You get to a first-name basis, you know their families, you know everything. So ideally, when you go into a very high-threat environment, you want to perform at the highest level, and you want to take care of your brother and come home—everybody come home safely.

[VO]: We talk about the four strategies both high-performing groups deploy in high stress situations. It's great advice for the rest of us too. So stick around!

[VO]: Capt. John Havlik retired from the Navy in 2014 after more than 30 years of distinguished military service, nearly all of them in the Naval Special Warfare community, most commonly known to civilians like me as the Navy SEALs. John graduated from West Virginia University as a 4-year lettered athlete, the first swimmer in WVU history to qualify for the U.S. Olympic Swimming Trials, in 1980. He served as tri-captain of the first undefeated men’s swim team in WVU history his senior year. In 2017, he was inducted into the WVU Sports Hall of Fame. The following year he was inducted into the Mountaineer Legends Society, WVU’s version of a sports Ring of Honor. John's career in the Navy began in 1982 and included a full range of worldwide duties in the SEAL and special operations community, including an assignment at the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, the SEALs' most elite operational special mission unit. It's tough to know how to address this guy! A Navy captain known affectionately as "coach" to his comrades—because he first enlisted while he was pursuing a job as swim coach and PE instructor—John Havlik also holds the academic rank of doctor. In fact, I first met him in Philly last April,   the day he defended the doctoral study we'll be talking about today. Captain Havlik also earned an M.A. in National Security and Strategic Studies from the Naval War College in Newport, RI. and a M.S. in Education from the University of Pennsylvania . The book he co-authored with Bill Treasurer is called The Leadership Killer: Reclaiming Humility in an Age of Arrogance. It focuses on humility as the fundamental leadership attribute. Havlik is also the CEO of JRH Consulting. Based in Tampa, FL, he consults with individuals and teams on building and leading high-performance teams.

[04:39]

HORN: Your military portfolio includes deployments across the globe in the seals and Special Ops, including an assignment at the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or as they were known when I was a kid, SEAL Team Six. That was the group responsible in 2011 for the killing of Osama bin Laden, for example. It's the most elite and top secret special mission unit. So let's start there. Tell us everything!

HAVLIK: I wish I could tell you a lot, but I really can't.

HORN: I was trying to catch you off guard by opening with that, but well played, Captain! Seriously, because they’re so badass, to use a technical term, Navy SEALs have ranked high in the U.S. public and movie-going imagination since I was little. (One of my first G.I. Joe action figures that I wanted to get was Torpedo—he was the SEAL.) In your experience, what are the biggest misconceptions people have about Navy SEALs?

HAVLIK: Most of the guys that I know and worked with are pretty quiet and humble and just go out and do their job. It's just another day at work. Yeah, we're in pretty good shape and, you know, we're all ruggedly handsome. You know, that’s part of the being a SEAL. But I think we're just normal people, and maybe that concept has been overplayed [in movies, etc.] We do a unique job, and we're heavily trained, and we're pretty good at it. But we're just like your neighbors or your family members, you know, we’re pretty simple people. And I think that's what's been forgotten. And that's what I found across Special Operations. You know, we [special military forces] have a moniker of “the quiet professionals.” Now some will argue that though all the books that have been out and the movies and some of the other stuff that's been going on, that maybe has been taken a bit too far, but in in general, like I said, we're just a bunch of guys that go to work every day and we have a unique mission and we train hard for it, and we're ready to act when called upon.

HORN: You were the first swimmer in the history of West Virginia University to qualify for the U.S. Olympic swimming trials. And you also served, in your senior year, as tri-captain of the first undefeated men's swim team in school history. I want to ask this question when it comes to coaching [swimming], did swimming come pretty easily to you? Or were there parts of it that you really had to work on to be competitive?

HAVLIK: I think, you know, when I was swimming, I had the opportunity to swim for some really good coaches. Even as a young kid growing up, the coach I had at the Naval Academy at the age group team there, was outstanding, and just start showing me the traits, the characteristics of being a good coach, and being there to help you improve in the water. Mostly it was speed, you want to swim fast, you know, you want to win, and okay, How do you do that? So he helped my technique and to perform in the water, which was what I wanted at that time, and then I went to college. I had a really good coach at West Virginia where I swam competitively, and he was very good. He gave me the opportunity to develop. He maybe was kind of like a second father to me. He gave me an opportunity, and he said, “This is what I expect from you.” And so whether it was staying in school or performing in the water, he kind of let me succeed or fail, you know, and he provided me the guidance, and he was there to help me if things didn't go right. And then I had a couple other coaches that I swam with, during the summers, between academic years. One of them was the Olympic coach at the time—this was in the late ‘70s. He had quite a lot of swimmers, and he has a great history in USA Swimming. And I learned a little bit of everything from all those coaches what I had to do to compete and do well in the water. And then once I was done with my eligibility, I wanted to give back and share and help others succeed, now that I was more of a coach or a figurehead than I was an actual competitor.

[09:43]

HORN: I wanted to move on to the real focus of what I wanted to talk to you about. The study that you did for your doctoral work is fascinating and groundbreaking, because it involves both of these dimensions, which is to say elite military operations and competitive swimming. So the full title of your doctoral study is Showtime: A Comparative Analysis of How U.S. Special Operations Service Members Cope with Deployment Stress, and How U.S. Senior National Team Swimmers Cope with Competition Stress to Maximally Perform. I imagine given your background, though, that neither deployment stress nor competition stress is foreign to you!

HAVLIK: Well I had close to 50 years of experience with competition or performance stress, and deployment stress, you know, with my swimming days, and then 30+ years in the Navy, conducting several overseas deployments in combat zones. So I've been exposed to it and I've had to learn to deal with it, and to do my job and do it well. And so the opportunity came up when I was at University of Pennsylvania for the doctoral study, the opportunity to do this. And so to study this just seemed natural to me. So I think I was in the perfect position to do the study and then I have a lot of experience in it. 

HORN: I mentioned that it was groundbreaking. It was groundbreaking because although it seems like a natural kind of comparison, if you're trying to think about high-stress environments, to take elite athletes and elite special ops and compare them, really you found that nobody had done that before. And so the groups that you're dealing with are members of the—was it 2021 U.S. Senior National Team? So you interviewed a group of them. And you interviewed a group of retired special ops military personnel?

HAVLIK: That's correct. Yes. When I was looking at the study, I did a pretty exhaustive scouring of the scholarly databases. And I found a lot of parallel studies on high-performing groups, whether it be athletes or doctors. I found parallel studies about how they handled stress, how they coped with stress to get ready to perform, but none that I had found that actually compared these two elite groups, okay, and what to implement. One of the past studies said, it'd be nice if how the U.S. special operations personnel trained to handle stress could be shared with sporting federations, as they prepare their athletes to compete at the highest levels, whether it's the Olympics or other world championships. So that kind of serves as the basis of why I wanted to do this and helps start forming the study. What I ultimately ended up coming down to was a members of the 2021-2022 U.S. national swimming team. I got several Olympians I got to talk to, and then retired Navy SEALs. I wanted to do the active duty side of the house, but there was some pushback from the Department of Defense and even the SEAL headquarters itself about interviewing active duty folks. So I reached out to several colleagues and talked to them. And the data I got was fantastic, because the folks I interviewed had completed over 40 deployments over 139 years of honorable service. So I think I got some really good data from the interviews of both groups.

HORN: We're going to talk about each of these findings. But I'm going to tick off the four at the outset to frame it for people listening. You found that National Team swimmers and special ops personnel shared four key understandings—or they maybe didn't express it this way, but this is the way that you presented and synthesized what they were telling you in these interviews—four commonalities about how to excel under high stress conditions: So first, they had absolute trust in their training. Second, they adhered to a strict routine. Third, they focused only on what they could control. And fourth, they used healthy and adaptive distractions. So we're going to work through those, because part of what's exciting and interesting is that not only could the stuff that you found out about the military be useful for the athletic training organizations who were interested in your work, but you recognized as you were working on this that these are ideas about excelling under high-stress situations that anybody in a high-stress situation could rely upon. And so it's useful for lots of people, even if you're not in most elite tier of these particular fields. So let’s start with training. What does “absolute trust in their training” look like?

HAVLIK: Well, the basic commonality between the two is both groups put in so much time, whether in the pool, in the weight room, and the SEALs in the BUD/S training—

HORN: BUD/S—is that Basic Underwater …

HAVLIK: Yeah, Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training. Yeah, sorry about that! But, you know, you start there, you lay the groundwork, you learn the basics of what a SEAL does, okay? And then you go to your SEAL team, and as you get ready to deploy, you're going to go through a very intense pre-deployment training cycle, where you add more complex, more intense training, where you start bringing in supporting units that are going to deploy with you, and you know, start working together. Because really, you don't want to wait to get on the battlefield to work with somebody for the first time. So what they're doing now is very intense, and they actually train with the units they're going to deploy with, before they actually go overseas.

HORN: So would those also be naval units, or would those be units from other branches of the military as well? Or, it depends?

HAVLIK: Well, it's still a combination of both. But really, in special operations, it's the joint environment: you're using assets from all the services. And so you may use Navy ships or submarines or aircraft. You're going to definitely use Army helicopters, you're going to use the US Air Force supporting assets. You name the gamut, it's out there. And so if it's available, you're going to use it. And so the idea is to not wait until you get over in [the] theater [of war], wherever you're deploying to; it’s to try to train in CONUS, or Continental United States, to work together, get some semblance of “Hey, I know you.” The worst part is going to do something and you meet the pilot for the first time! It's like, “Hey, can you do this job?” you know, “Who are you?” If you have already worked through that beforehand, it's a little more comforting. It brings the stress down: Hey, I've worked with these people. I know they can do the job. Stress level comes down, I'm ready to go out and operate. And so that’s the SEAL side of the house. With the swimmers, you know, they've put so much time into the water, and working on their basic fundamentals and their skills with their coaches and their teammates. And they're so ingrained in what they do and what time they put into it, that they know they've done the requisite preparation to get ready to perform at a major international competition. So in both cases, you draw that all together, whatever group you're in: Hey, I've done this training, I am ready to perform, let's go do it!

[18:42]

HAVLIK (cont.): You talk to the swimmers, they try not to change anything as they get closer to competition. You know, they've worked on their fundamentals, they've done what they've needed to do. When they start their process of tapering—that's when they start resting physically and mentally and emotionally. You know, as they start prepping their bodies and minds to compete, they tend to stick to their routine. And this is why all the findings start coming all together is they stick to their routines that have worked on the past, and gets them into that mindset that I've done all my training. Now I'm doing the things I need to prepare to get myself ready, to step on the block and do the best race I can. And those events I can't control—I talk to the swimmers, especially at the Olympics, there's just things they can't control: media requests, transportation, where they sleep in the Olympic Village, the size of the bed … there's just little things they can't control, but they can add up to the stressors that could affect their performance. And that just goes to finding three: just control those things I can control. And the same thing with the SEALs is you can't always control what the enemy does. You know, they have they have a say in what's going to happen. And so you train to the best of your abilities to prepare for what you need to do. In our planning, we do a lot of what we call “what ifs.” What if this happens? What if this? you know—extreme events that may arise that at least we've thought about it and we kind of come up with a plan of action in case that arises, but you can't plan for everything. In either case, you can't plan for everything.

HORN: So you mentioned, just to hang out on [Finding] Two [i.e., swimmers and SEALS adhere to a strict routine] for a second, you mentioned that tapering is this process of getting ready for swimmers so that you're not like, obviously, swimming as hard as you can as long as you can right up until the day of the event, right? That you're there preparing for it. So tapering, that makes sense. What kind of routine for the SEALs, or maybe especially in deployment, but what does the “strict routine” look like?

HAVLIK: Well, I mean, most of the special operations-type events happen at night. And so, really one of the first things you have to do is you have to get on a night routine. Whereas a lot of people work during the day—even though you're overseas, there's always a 24/7 process going on. But you'll find in large organizations, the heaviest amount of participants or people that are working is during the day, you know. Flip it all around: in special operations, most of their operations are going on at night, and so they're sleeping during the day, or they're resting or they're planning, they're coordinating. And so there's a reversal right there. That's not the norm of what you're doing back in the States, you know, so you have to get into that mindset. In the military a big thing we do is called our “battle rhythm.” And it really defines everything you have to do for a day, you know, to get you ready to get you through the day. And it kind of outlines all your events. And battle rhythm defined for me when I got up, when I went to bed, you know, and everything else in between, I tried to fit it in: the outside meetings, outside coordination. And then, when do I go eat? When do I work out? When do I call home? All those little things that are important to you, but may not be important to the war effort—to try to mix it all together and find that battle rhythm, that routine, that gets you going. I found, and I think a lot of people would back me up on this, is that the sooner you get over to a deployment area and you get on your battle rhythm, it really brings the stress down, because deploying to an unknown area brings stress, just by the deployment factor itself. And then you get into an area where the stress level will rise because they are deployed in a battle zone or a or combat area, you know, and then you may go out and do something and then your stress level goes way back up. But it comes down to that baseline level. Deployment seems to be a sustained stress level, with peaks and valleys of when you do operations that you do not face when you're back home, when things are a little bit more normal.

HORN: So for example—and despite my opening question, I'm really not trying to prompt you to divulge military secrets!—but like, what would be standard, if you knew that you had—and I know it doesn't work like this, but let's suppose we're going to have a mission 10 days from now, obviously a night mission, like how long before that would I want to be shifting into my “battle rhythm” and maybe sleeping accordingly or trying to adjust? You said as soon as possible, right? But like, what would be the minimum advisable time, like a few days in advance? Would you want to be for a week …?

HAVLIK: The swimmers—even when I was swimming, like if you trained on the East Coast and your major meet was on the West Coast, you tried to get into the routine and adjust your training schedule so that Hey, I'm swimming at the time I'm going to swim on the West Coast. So that may be an adjustment to your workout hours. You’re finding that rhythm so that when when you make that transfer over from East Coast to West Coast, it's doesn't affect your body, your circadian rhythm, all that other stuff. You’ve already done that: Hey, I'm already into this cycle. And that's it. So they were doing that. Swimming may not have been going to a battlefield, but we started our tapers. Hey, we're going to we're going to change our workout routines a little bit because instead of swimming at three o'clock in the afternoon, you're gonna be swimming at noon on the West Coast, we're gonna have to adjust our workouts here to get you on that pace. So your body starts getting used to that cycle. And that's why I say when when you went on deployment, the sooner you got on that battle rhythm, the better off you were to start preparing for— Ten days, that's a long time! I mean, there's guys I know that deployed and they turn over and they were out the next night, you know, conducting operations. So if you've got an opportunity like that for 10 days of preparation, the sooner you get into it, the better off you are.

[26:22]

PHILLIP ELLIS [ad]: Hey there, it's Phillip again. As you might suspect, Pete tends to work the fact that he makes a podcast into casual conversation. On a Zoom call last fall, we were checking in and catching up, and Pete mentioned that he'd just released an episode on How to Write the College Application Essay. This was about a month before the public launch of ChatGPT, but let me tell you, it's still good advice! I listened to the episode as the father of a high school senior who spending months writing and revising these types of essays, and let me just tell you, that's when I started supporting Point of Learning. If you agree with me that this podcast provides valuable, carefully presented information about what,  how and why we learn, in a wide range of subjects—from school leadership to sociology to the intersection of stress and sports and special ops in this conversation with Coach Havlik—consider joining me in supporting this work. You can do it monthly, or make a generous one-time donation like I did last fall. Although this ad copy is reminding me that it might be a good time for me to re-up? Anyway, it's worth it, so click the link on the show page to learn more about contributing, and back to the show!

[27:31]

HAVLIK: What I found with the swimmers and the SEALs, the commonality was, Hey, I did the training. I believe in it, I'm ready to perform. I can only control the events that I have influence over and I can't worry about the rest of it. And I kind of asked one of the swimmers. I said, “So what was it like to walk out on the pool deck at the Olympics?” Because I’m curious. You know, it's got to be a huge event, stressful. I mean, here it is, the pinnacle of competitive swimming. And he goes, “I don't know, I just dumbed it down to the way I could control it.” And I said, “Can you explain that to me?” And he said, “No, I can't. It's just worked for me. I just brought it down to the level that I could manage. Whether that was just walking from the ready room to the right block, and getting ready to swim …” I was like, “Man, that's amazing how you can do that. Because I would think that's the most stressful time! You know, I'm walking, I'm on the pool deck, this is what I worked out for. This is what I made it for. Now I'm representing my country at the biggest swimming event in the world! ‘And I just dumbed it down to my level’! How do you do that?” So whatever, like you know, it just kind of highlights a lot, a lot of what you do, to handle stress or to cope with stress is very individualistic.

HORN: And literally focusing on, you know, so I wonder … I don't suppose that swimmer was staring at a lot of people in the stands, for example, during that walk from the locker room to the starting block. Probably they were focused on the pool, rather than taking it all in.

HAVLIK: If you watch—and I didn't break down specifically what they did and didn't do, but they did identify a few things. But a lot of them comes into Finding Four: those healthy and adaptive distractions. Hey, I've got my music on, you know. A lot of them wear their headphones, and they're just pumping music, or they're listening to something, just something that distracted them from the enormity of the event, you know, help them really to better relate to what they had to do. And so if you watch a lot of the swimmers, when they come out of the ready  room, they've got the headphones on, they don't hear the crowd until they take off the headphones. Twenty thousand people—that’s what the normal audience is for a swimming event at the Olympics. So you may hear it a little bit more in the water, but the pre-race stuff, they work on those routines. Hey, what have I done in the past to do this? I throw my headphones on, I put my goggles on, I focus on the water. I don't watch my competitors, what they're doing, how they're preparing. And then when it gets very quiet, when it's the start of the race, they may not even hear 20,000 people screaming.

HORN: You know, I'm struck that in both of these contexts, the military context and the swimming context, you do have this team dimension: they're in it together. Does the aspect of having the other teammates, people who are going through the same thing as you are who have your back in a certain sense, who understand it—is that a dimension that they spoke about as well?

HAVLIK: Swimmers talked an awful lot about the stress and the pressures of being part of Team USA. And the past history of success of USA Swimming. And they have a lot to carry on! That's a tradition that is carried on from team to team to team, and the new team feels that and they know it and just by being on Team USA, there's a huge expectation of success that comes with it. And so you're talking not just a team, you're talking a nation. And they know that, and that's part of the deal, and n what they have to accept as being part of the national team. And if they need to work on that, there are sports psychologists there that USA Swimming offers up. There is help that they seek, but there is tremendous team and country pressure for being part of the US National Swimming Team. For SEALs, it's always been about your brother, you know, your brotherhood, having their back, you don't want to let them down. That's why it’s a very close-knit environment, and you learn, you work, you train and work with your fellow operators, you get to a first-name basis, you know their families, you know everything. So ideally, when you go into a very high-threat environment, you want to perform at the highest level, and you want to take care of your brother, and come home, everybody come home safely.

[33:02]

HORN: I’m thinking about how you translate these things to somebody who is not in one of these elite environments—

HAVLIK: Well, I think the best best story I can tell you is I applied everything I've learned to the context of being a student. There’s the story of my final semester in the Penn CLO [Chief Learning Officer] program, and the final academic block, and all the work that comes with that. And then I had to finish up my Master’s. And then I had to do my comprehensive exams, or papers, all in a very short amount of time, just to finish the program and then be able to go on to the dissertation phase of it. And so I was kind of freaking out, I was losing sleep. I was trying to figure out how I was going to do all this, and I called a couple of my classmates. And I said, “What are you doing? How are you handling the same pressures?” And they explained what they were doing. But you know, for me, they were like, “Look, John, you've gone through harder things in your life. You can figure this out!” And so I just said, “Okay, I'll sit down and map out what I need to do, when it needs to be done. You know, how am I going to get through this semester and knock out all this work. And so what I did was I just kind of sat down, and I applied a couple sayings that I used in SEAL training to help me get through school. And so I took the SEAL motto the only easy day was yesterday. And I changed that to say “the only easy paper was the last one submitted.” I had the training: I definitely had the training in the SEALs, I had the training at Penn to do the dissertation. I got myself in a routine—I've carried a routine I learned when I was a young swimmer that carried me through the SEALs and a military career and carried me through the dissertation. I set up a routine to get through and complete school. And then I can only control what I can control—those smaller segments, instead of the enormity of the big project. I can't graduate in May without doing the work in January and all the things in between, and then I just used healthy and adaptive distractions. Working out has always been something big for me. For SEALs, it's our main healthy and adaptive distraction, you know, and so swimming, just doing some self-care things that helped me distract from Hey, I gotta go write another 20 pages in Chapter Four. It was like, Well, I can go out and take a bike ride, I can walk down the boulevard down here by the bay, just get some fresh air. So anything to distract it away. It really helped me, like I said, break down the enormity of a big project into the smaller segments I can control and still produce quality work. And I said, If I can take those findings and context of being a SEAL into being a student, then I believe my findings from what I did can be used by anybody, in any profession, any gender, any sex—because stress is prevalent in all aspects of life. You want to be a good parent, you want to be a good father, mother, teacher.

HORN: As we've been talking about this, it occurs to me that so many of these things have to do with mindset, have to do with belief, your state of mind, your approach to it. So that, for example, when we're talking about having trust in your training, it's the difference between saying, Well, I've been trained, but I don't know how good it was, what do these people know? You know, Maybe it won't work for me, as opposed to saying like, No, I've got this, I know how to do this! That’s the trusting mentality, or focusing on what you control. That's a mental exercise, as much as—I mean, that one is almost exclusively a mental exercise. Because there are these things that I care about, or I'm worried about, they're out here, and they could turn themselves into racing thoughts or anxiety about what I can actually do, but I'm going to bring it back, and take a breath, and recognize that This is the thing that I can have some kind of direct influence and control over. That's what I'm going to focus on. I can't worry about the rest of this stuff that may be important to me, but I can't let it take up my headspace right now. You know, a lot of this has to do with mental exercise in developing that mental stamina, that mental endurance, and I imagine there's a certain amount of self-talk in this, right? Like, I've got this. I trained for this—

HAVLIK: Yeah, positive self-talk was huge in both groups that I studied. The mental aspect—you know, swimmers often say something like, You know, when you get up on a block at the race, physically, almost all of you have done the same thing to get there. Now it's really about the mental side: Who wants to win the most? It’s hugely mental. And that's really the difference between those that are up on the podium from those that aren't on the podium. For one of the findings I had, one of the SEALs actually commented: “Just that confident self-talk … everything was positive self-talk about what was about to happen, and just keeping the negative out. All that positive self-talk really would lower the stress response. The negative was just—I would really go out of my way to keep the negative out.” And I think that pretty much summed it up with the SEALs, but it's the same thing with swimmers. It’s a natural thing to do, especially during the taper, when they're really fine-tuning everything and getting ready to race. There's a lot of self-doubt: Hey, have I done enough? Have I really done enough? And that's normal. I think you talk to any athlete when they're getting ready for a big performance, they're gonna look back and say, Hey, did I do everything I needed to do to be ready to perform at my best? And I heard that a lot with the swimmers and they did their best to try to push that out of the way. Yes, I've done that. And I'm ready to race. And they just keep that negative self-talk out. It was huge. Everybody talks about that. Everybody I interviewed talked about it.

[VO]: That's it for today's show! Thanks so much to Coach Havlik for joining me to talk about his study. You can learn more about him and his work at coachhavlik.com, which is linked on the show page. Thanks as always to Shayfer James for intro and outro music. Special instrumental versions of two more of his songs found their way into today's episode. See music notes on the show page for those titles. To learn about new titles of new songs Shayfer seems to drop every time I turn around, explore shayferjames.com. Finally, thanks to you for listening, and supporting this show any way you can. One free way to support this project is to share an episode with someone who might especially like it. If you can think of just one person who might appreciate these tips on how to function under extreme stress, please pass it along. It will mean most coming from you! If you listen on Apple Podcasts especially, please take a moment to rate and review the show. If you're not yet on the Point of Learning newsletter list, it's absolutely free and only comes out when I drop a new episode (so I promise not to crowd your inbox). Point of Learning is written, recorded, edited, mixed, and mastered by me here in sunny Buffalo! I'm Peter Horn and I'll be back at you soon with a fresh take on what and how and why we learn. See you then!

9 WAYS TO ENGAGE STUDENTS AS CITIZENS TRANSCRIPT (044)

[Peter Horn, VOICEOVER]: Hello friends, as longtime listeners know, one sign you're dealing with a special episode is hearing me instead of visiting vocal talent setting up the show. I have a few full-length episodes in various planning stages that I'll be excited to share throughout the fall, but I thought I'd interrupt the summer break that the old school teacher in me revels in to bring you audio from the 10-minute keynote I delivered to all the school superintendents in New York State in Albany in early March. This was the Winter Institute of the New York State Council of School Superintendents, a.k.a. NYSCOSS in public school parlance. The theme of the convention was The Road to Awesome, which I want to observe now because I refer to “The Road to Awesome” twice during my remarks. I didn't get to pick that theme, but I did get to choose the theme of my remarks, which was How to Engage Students as Citizens. Aligning with my major research and teaching interests of civil discourse and student perceptions of school, engaging students as citizens has only increased in importance in recent months as the race for president heats up—as well as our climate, in this hottest summer on record—and, of course, our culture wars continue to blaze. The style of this keynote is called an Ignite speech, meant to fire people up, but also meaning that the accompanying slide deck cycles at an automatic clip of 30 seconds per slide. I mention this for two reasons: First, sometimes you hear me speeding up or slowing down a bit to sync with the merciless pace of the auto-advance of the slides. Second, I make a joke about the name Ignite early into my remarks, while showing a slide depicting seven of the most-banned books in recent years—for example, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale—engulfed in flames. Designed by my dear friend Roy Chambers, that image appears on the show page if you want to check it out, and in the video version of the speech, now available on the Point of Learning YouTube Channel. Aight, without further ado, here is Superintendent Martha Group of the Central NY district Vernon Verona Sherrill, in her capacity as President of NYSCOSS. (If you were missing some Shayfer James as intro music, wait for it!)

[02:20]

MARTHA GROUP: It is my pleasure to introduce Dr. Peter Horn for the first Ignite session entitled How to Engage Students as Citizens. Please help me in welcoming my friend and colleague Dr. Peter Horn to the stage.

[02:40]

PETER: This song was written by Shayfer James, a talented musician I first met as my student in College Prep English IV my first year teaching, 25 years ago. After learning about his passion for music and theatre, I made sure to attend the school shows he was performing in. Today Shayfer has fans around the world, with over 2M streams and downloads per month. I can’t claim any credit for Shayfer’s success—he’s worked his butt off for years…

…but I do claim that school plays an important role in whether or not young people come to believe that they have the power to change their community and the world. Which is why I’m honored to be speaking to you here on the Road to Awesome about How to Engage Students as Citizens. We have all seen in recent years that the small-d democratic features of our republic may be much more fragile than we grew up believing.

You may wonder if I took “IGNITE” presentation too literally, but this is a reminder of the stakes you know all too well. Yes, some people do want to ban and burn books—usually, somehow, in the name of “freedom”—but we also know that many others get rich or get elected by fanning flames of anger and fear. Thank you for the good work you do, especially in these strange times. I am not a superintendent, but I do get to work with some great ones!

To me, the solution lies in the quality of relationships between citizens, between neighbors, between family members, and with respect to what we as educators can most directly influence, between teachers and students. As a classroom teacher for 18 years I saw that students tended to learn more the more I learned to understand them as individuals with whole lives and interests outside my class. My subsequent research into how students describe outstanding teaching bears this out.

Students don’t need our help learning to be consumers. But they do need help learning empathy, compassion, and respect for people with differing perspectives. Chances are good they won’t learn from cable news or YouTube how to disagree respectfully or provide evidence for arguments. One focus of my work as an educator, teacher and now consultant has been cultivating these skills and dispositions in students and the faculty and staff who interact with them.

With the right support, young people can learn to listen and make arguments in good faith. If students believe their views and actions can make a difference in their school community, they will be much likelier to believe they can make a difference in the larger community as adults. I make no assumptions about what you in your districts may or may not be doing already—indeed I would love to learn that from you—but here are 9 ways to start:

Respect student feedback about teaching. Most students are not experts in calculus or Mandarin, but they are experts in their own experience of school. But we don’t ask them, or we don’t ask regularly enough. The most helpful feedback I got for 18 years as a high school teacher came from reading anonymous answers to these three questions by every student at the end of every marking period.

Debate less, discuss more. Classroom debates with “winners” and “losers” are often awkward exercises where kids are most concerned with looking stupid in front of their friends. Instead, strive for discussions in which students help each other think through matters of real interest. Yes, this is hard: I believe that facilitating a real discussion is the most difficult skill for teachers to master. Coaching is often necessary, but it can come from colleagues who excel at it.

Develop critical literacy strategies. Put simply, critical literacy pushes beyond the basic reading skills of decoding and comprehension to develop students’ ability to engage texts ranging from science books to poems to pop-up Internet ads, and ask critical questions about authorship, implicit assumptions, and consequences. Critical literacy helps students develop deeper awareness of how all kinds of texts influence our thoughts and actions.

Solicit student viewpoints across the curriculum. Students can practice discussion and critical thinking skills in every subject area, from the pros and cons of vitamin supplements in phys ed to differing strategies for solving a proof in geometry. Again, my theory of action is that kids are much likelier to behave like citizens as adults if they’ve had practice feeling like citizens in school.

Let students co-create learning experiences. Many teachers offer engaging assignments, but comparatively few seek out students’ input in helping to design the kinds of assignments or labs or essential questions that would really fire them up. We adults tend do school the way it was done to us, but as we strive to connect with kids who have now have access to parts of the world we never knew existed, it’s time to change the game!

Invite students to serve on school committees. You probably have a committee right now where student voice could valuably inform the work, like student stress, or academic integrity, or revising the district mission statement. This image comes from a focus group I ran with Martha Group in Vernon Verona Sherrill last month. We were asking middle-schoolers for feedback on language for a draft of a survey for which they had previously suggested ideas for questions.

Provide opportunities to practice civil discourse. Beginning after the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, I co-moderated an after-school discussion forum open to all members of the high school community. We practiced respectful conversations about topics that are hard to talk about, from textbook censorship to same-sex marriage to the killing of Trayvon Martin.

This year as a Penn Fellow in Democratic and Civic Engagement, I’m studying opportunities in and around Buffalo for students to practice civil discourse, so I’m gonna spend a couple more fast-paced slides on why this is so hard! NYU social psychologist Jonathan Haidt likes to quip that we all think we’re scientists, objectively evaluating data and drawing conclusions analytically. Truth is, we’re much more like lawyers ardently defending a position we already believe.

Because we’re all quite fallible when it comes to our own beliefs, we need each other to respectfully challenge us to think harder and better. This is, of course, the point of the Socratic method—or the adversarial system in our courts of law. Argument gets challenged by counter-argument in an effort to seek the truth. To do it well, respect and trust are critical: it’s not about proving an opponent wrong; it’s about seeking the truth. 

We don’t need to start practicing civil discourse with the most politically charged topics; in fact, you can’t go deep until respect and trust have been established in a group. But there are many areas of shared concern that are not (yet) politically fraught. How about talking in real ways with kids and colleagues about the changes that AI should or should not affect the way we teach writing? Is it like calculators once were for math teachers, or Google Translate for World Languages? How, or how not?

Back to the list! Make public art. Many schools honor student expression via formal outlets like literary magazines, school concerts and district art shows, but also important are informal coffeehouses, (ungraded) interdisciplinary projects and other spaces for students to exhibit their ideas about the world. As you know, there are lots of kids who won’t raise their hand in class or feel comfortable writing, but they all have something to say.

One of my favorite examples comes from 2011, when I was teaching Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man to a class of seniors who wanted to explore their own feelings of invisibility in school as a result of factors like poor grades or depression or LGBTQ identity. Inspired by the Chinese artist Liu Bolin, they chose spots in the building and volunteered to have their classmates literally paint them into the background. This is a still from the YouTube video.

Let students lead. Especially given our increasingly digital world, students have a great stake in relevant preparation with respect to technology and innovative thinking. In the alternative school I used to lead, way back in 2013, teachers identified a team of students to pilot our district’s first 1:1 laptop initiative. These students met our expectations that they set and solve problems, and they gradually leaned in toward their leadership potential.

Here’s the list again. The slide deck is available with your conference materials, and I’d love to talk with you further about any of the ideas I’ve shared this morning. My podcast for a general audience all about what and how and why we learn, is called Point of Learning. The next episode will feature my conversation with Jonathan Kozol, available, among other places, on my website, which is HornEdConsulting.org. I’m Peter Horn, and I thank you so much for the opportunity to speak to you today about an area of passionate interest for me. Hope to see you again on the Road to Awesome!

[12:27]

That's it for today's special episode, offered without a commercial break. You know, I have to say that at the start of the summer I was pitched pretty hard to add an advertiser to this show, which is the way most podcasts that enjoy a certain following do it, to keep the lights on, as it were. I thought about it for a while, flattered that a company was interested in my passion project all about what and how and why we learn, but you know, I like the way things are set up now, with the monthly or one-time contributions, so that those who enjoy and share these episodes can kick in a few dollars directly to the show. You can learn more about that on the show page. If you're doing that already, thanks again. It means a lot! Your donations helped me make the move last month from GarageBand to Logic Pro and a suite of Izotope tools so I can keep pushing the sound design of this show, staying as much as I can at the point of learning. Thanks as always to Shayfer James for intro and outro music. The new studio release of songs Shayfer wrote with Kate Douglas for their musical The Ninth Hour, a retelling of the Beowulf story that kills in so many ways, just dropped with a brand new study guide hot off the PDF presses, curated by someone you're listening to right now. Thanks to NYSCOSS for sharing video and audio of this speech. Thanks to Greg Jackson of Action J Productions for overseeing the video release, and thanks to you for listening, subscribing, rating (5 Stars), and reviewing this podcast wherever you get it. Reviewing only takes a minute and really helps people find this resource. I'll be back at you in early fall with my interview featuring retired Navy SEAL and Hall of Fame Coach, Dr. John Havlik. See you then!

Dancing Badly Transcript (043)

TERRY ROWLANDS, opening in full-on Irish: Dia daoibh, is mise Traoach O’Rotlain agus tá mé ag caint sibh as Baile Átha Cliath in Éirinn. [Hello, I’m Terry Rowlands and I’m speaking to you from Dublin in Ireland]—and you are at the Point of Learning with my friend Peter Horn. When President Biden recently visited Ireland, he explained that he quotes Irish poets as often as he does because he believes our poets are the greatest poets. While he may not be wrong about that, the U.S. definitely does have some pretty good podcasts, and you’re listening today to one of my favourites. Stay tuned for Pete’s conversation with the Grammy-award-winning and multi-talented performance artist Rinde Eckert, and enjoy the show! 

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today’s show …

RINDE ECKERT: What happened for me—which was the larger issue—was that all of this stuff became a metaphor for everything else I was doing.

[VO]: Rinde Eckert, an award-winning artist who has been reconsidering the basics of performance:

RINDE: Every instrument is the same way: Let the instrument tell you when it’s time. But first it’s establish integrity. Always try to play with integrity … and what is integrity? Then you have to ask, “What is integrity?” Well, integrity is the wedding of intention with action.

[VO]: He shares some of his strategies for engaging the humility of the Beginner’s Mind.

RINDE: We would do this thing where I would have them dance, and then I’d say, “I want you to dance badly.” They have to think about What is dancing badly? So already they’re in their bodies in a very different way, because they’re not thinking about the model of dancing. They’re now thinking about How do I contort myself? What’s my relationship to the rhythm?

[VO]: All that and much more, so let’s go!

[Underscore: Air from Bach’s Goldberg Variations played by Rinde just before we recorded our conversation]

[02:17]

[VO]: Rinde Eckert is a celebrated writer, composer, librettist, musician, performer and director, but I’m not sure even this list of roles captures his extraordinary versatility. Just within the past year, for example, Rinde has danced with a San Francisco company, he played a benefit with a jazz ensemble in New York, he composed the score for a new play, he composed a new song for an old Shakespeare play, he sang lead in the premiere of a technically grueling yet gorgeous opera about Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, he played an Irish warden in his wife’s update of Antigone called Kissing the Floor—I got to see that one in New York (awesome!)—and he taught interdisciplinary art, as he has done at Princeton University, the University of California, the University of Iowa, and numerous other schools across the U.S. Rinde has won a Grammy, was a finalist for a Pulitzer, is a Guggenheim fellow, and has been my friend for more than 20 years, which poses a problem this host has had the good fortune to encounter several times before: Rinde is someone I’ve wanted to talk with since I began dreaming about the possibility of a podcast; the trouble is that the better I know someone, the more conversations we’ve had without microphones, the more I worry that we could just get to talking about anything. After I made an episode featuring his wife and frequent collaborator Ellen McLaughlin last fall, I got serious about overcoming this challenge, and he and I decided to focus on his recent project of rebuilding his piano technique from the ground up. This is an artist who can play as many instruments as I can name, and here he is, a critically acclaimed musician, trying to forget everything he knows and approaching piano study as if he were a total novice. We spoke in early March at his home just outside New York City.

[04:26]

PETER: As you continue to have this career where it’s been decades now, creating original work, touring with it, premiering other people’s original work, performing in it, all throughout this country, all around the world … Here at the age of 70, you are in this project of taking apart your technique with the piano and rebuilding it from the ground up. You are approaching it again with the Beginner’s Mind. So I wanted to start with: what’s that like, and what inspired you to take on this project?

RINDE: Well, COVID was a big impetus, but I had started the project before. I’d been playing piano a lot. I would read through the Well-Tempered Clavier, and I would read through a lot of Bach, mostly Bach, at night.

PETER: And because we’re sitting at the piano, of course you can feel free, as you’re inspired, to to give us a few bars of anything by means of illustration. There are so many times with an audio podcast that somebody’s describing a picture and I can’t show that to them. But here we are at your beautiful Steinway …

RINDE: And one impetus is actually this piece, this particular piece, which is the C#—

[Rinde demonstrates a Bach passage on his Steinway] And so on and so forth. It was in the beauty of that … and occasionally I would play it well. Occasionally, I felt like I played it well—and I didn’t know why, I couldn’t repeat it—I would have one night when suddenly I was in touch with the instrument in a way that was surprising to me, and to Ellen, who was listening because I did this at night, it was always before I go to bed. It was like, go in, read through some Bach, whether it’s Bach suites, you know, English or French suites or the Goldberg Variations or the—

PETER: Inventions?

RINDE: Or the inventions, yeah. Partitas, too, I would go through, and so it was just a thing. And every once in a while, I’d hit it and she would go, “Well, that was good!” It was like a comment on—

PETER: Yeah, I hear you!

RINDE: It was okay before, but—and she was right! You know, she has a really good ear. And she was right. That was different. And it was wonderful, because she was listening and she would notice. Now that was different, you know, that was good. And I’d go, “Yeah.” And then finally I said, “I don’t know how to get there on a regular basis. I know it’s in there. I know I can get there. How do I get there?” And then she said, “You know, I have this friend Adrienne, who I grew up with, who was a concert pianist, and then decided to be a teacher. And she’s apparently a very good teacher.” And I said, “Well, I don’t know. You know, she’s probably way out of my league.” But you know, I kept thinking, well, I’m gonna call Adrienne—Adrienne Sirkin.” So I called up Adrienne and I went in and I finally said, “You know, I want to figure out how I can play.” She said, “Well, play something for me.” And I started out—[Rinde demonstrates the opening measures of the main theme of the Goldberg Variations]—and I played that, not actually that well [laughs], but I played the whole Air of the Goldberg Variations for her. And her response was “Well, you know, what’s remarkable is how your musical ideas are coming through, even though you have no technique!” And then she said, “Shall we get you some technique?”

PETER: And so, some basic talk for a non-pianist: what would constitute “piano technique,” as she was referring to it?

RINDE: Well, that, you know, that was what I needed to know! [Laughter.] Because obviously I didn’t understand what piano technique actually was. As it turns out, it’s a lesson in life is what it is—

PETER: Oh all right!

RINDE: In Adrienne’s hands, it’s a lesson in life. And she said, “How deep do you want to go?” First lesson in life: How deep do you want to go in your relationship to this instrument? And I said, “I’ve got nothing to lose. I’m not ever gonna be a virtuoso pianist. I don’t perform on this instrument. I mean, I perform, but I’m playing for myself singing. So it’s not like I have to be a virtuoso, but I would love to be able to accompany myself well, at some point on some Lieder if I wanted to—”

PETER: So [Lieder are] German art songs.

RINDE: “—or my own songs. Just being able to play the accompaniment well, but I have no pretensions. I just want to do as deep a dive as I can do. And I said, you know, what I’d love to be able to do is play the second movement of Bach’s D minor piano concerto really well”—[plays a quick passage]. It’s a beautiful thing. And I thought, “I want to be able to play that so well that it’s indistinguishable from a real pianist.” That would be great if I can get to that point where a slow movement—I’m never gonna be able to play really fast with any degree of integrity, but I would love to be able to just sit down and feel like, Man, you know, Bach was happy with that! So she said, “Okay, let’s go. But if you’re really serious, you’re gonna have to drop everything you’re doing.” So I had to close the Well-Tempered Clavier. I put the [Bach] books away, just put ‘em away. She said, “You can’t do that now. You have to rebuild your hand because your hand has habits. We have to break the habits.” So I have a strong determination to do this. And so she said, “Okay, good.” Then we stopped and we defined the project, which was Deep Dive. Great. And then you agree to the terms of that deep dive: You go with a master—in this case, Adrienne—who says Here’s what it takes to do the deep dive, from my long experience shepherding people through this process. So you submit to the teacher, and you say, Okay. And you try. And I had to master my impatience, which is really one of my great life failings—if I can master that at the end of my life! But this is one way to do it. And we started by just my relationship, just sitting at the piano. Look, let’s look at the keyboard! What is that? That’s, you know, that’s this mechanical thing. It’s in a row and it’s straight. All the keys are lined up. Everything’s very lined up. It’s very orderly. Very, very, even. All the keys are in the right place. They’re in a straight line, all the way. Now look at your hand. What do you notice about your hand? Well, the distance between the fingers is, you know, that’s not straight. So how are you gonna turn this organic and odd thing into a thing that plays on this very straight line? Well, what, are you gonna curl your fingers? Because your thumb is way out here! It’s two inches away from your next finger. So in order to get those fingers together to play next to each other, what’s gonna happen? How do you get your thumb and your index finger on that keyboard? So that was what we started with. After just getting our relationship, [next was] placing my hand on the keyboard, just getting used to placing my hand on the keyboard while keeping some weight in the arm, and working on constantly reinforcing the connection, the energy connection in the body so that if you move slightly forward, the whole body responds. It’s not just the arm that responds; the whole body responds when the hand goes to the piano. If you go up, the body moves with it. So everything is the dance of this energy through your arm into the keyboard. But what happened for me, which was the larger issue, was that all of this stuff became a metaphor for everything else I was doing. Every other instrument benefited. I discovered that I wasn’t actually playing every note. I was glossing over some notes. And we would do a scale and she would say, “Well, you didn’t play the G.” Technically, I played it, but my finger hadn’t actually gotten to the depth of that particular sound. She said, “You have to play every note.” That’s what you hear in great pianists: every note is played.

PETER: Would you be able to simulate with a scale what that’s like? I mean, you can take a couple passes. You don’t have to get it on the first time! [Rinde demonstrates with a quick scale.]

RINDE: That was sloppy. So I’m kind of glossing over the notes. [Playing again, more deliberately] That’s much better. And one of the things she said too was “Let the piano tell you when it’s time to go fast.” And that’s true of the drums too. [Rinde begins drumming with his fingers on the frame of the piano.] You’re also trying to figure out how fast can I go before the integrity breaks down? And you have to define integrity by going slowly enough to understand what the integrity of that is. And then the drum will tell you suddenly it’ll want to go fast. And every instrument is the same way: Let the instrument tell you when it’s time. But first it’s: establish integrity. Always try and play with integrity, and what is integrity? Then you have to ask, “What is integrity?” Well, integrity is the wedding of intention with action.

[16:34]

[VO]: So Rinde’s elegant working definition of integrity in performance is “the wedding of intention with action.” In other words, there’s a marriage between what you’re trying to do as a performer and what you actually do. I asked him about how he as a teacher challenged students to interrogate their own ideas about integrity.

RINDE: I taught interdisciplinary theatre at Princeton for about six or seven years. And in my class, we were talking about acting and being on the stage, and so one of the first things I do is I have them dance. I have them move their bodies just because they need to move their bodies because the blood is not flowing. We had morning classes, on Friday morning, and it was like everybody was just, you know—

PETER: It comes after Thursday night. Big night.

RINDE: And so they were not ready to think or do anything. They were ready to do what very smart kids, like kids at Princeton, do, which is: they know what thinking looks like [Pete erupts in laughter] and they can approximate thinking. And they’re very facile at that.

PETER: They’ve made an academic career of it, in some cases!

RINDE: Yeah. They’re basically rehashing what somebody else thought, you know? It’s not really their thinking. They’re not thinking; they’re just rehashing what they know other people think about something.

[VO]: Just popping in for a second to say that although I didn’t study with Rinde when I was in college, I did attend Princeton as an undergraduate, and I identify with kids who sometimes rehash other people’s ideas as if they were original thoughts. I was one of those kids! I’m sharing this less as a humble brag about the college I was lucky enough to attend and more as an explanation for my extra giggling in through here. I felt seen!

RINDE: We would do this thing where I would have them dance and then I’d say, “I want you to dance badly.” So then I would put on music and have them dance badly.

PETER: Can we just double-click? Because again, I think the Princeton context is important. You’re asking for a subpar, a suboptimal performance—

RINDE: Exactly.

PETER: —from kids who are trained not to do that.

RINDE: Right.

PETER: Okay.

RINDE: So they’re trying to dance badly and very often I’m exhorting them while they’re doing this: “No, it’s not bad enough! Worse! Worse than that, worse than that!” So they have to figure out, they have to think about What is dancing badly? So already they’re in their bodies in a very different way, because they’re not thinking about the model of dancing. They’re now thinking about How do I contort myself? What’s my relationship to the rhythm?

PETER: There is music for this exercise that they are dancing to—or dancing against?

RINDE: Yes, music that they’re dancing against, largely. We talk about dancing against the impulse in the music. So I give them some instruction to keep them moving, but then they have to do that. And then, once I’m satisfied they’ve got something going, then I say, “Now let’s exaggerate that by 50%.” And that’s an interesting equation. Then they have to think about, What is it that I’m exaggerating?

PETER: Thank God there’s some math!

RINDE: And then they have to figure out how they’re exaggerating, and they’re lost in the process. And their bodies now are wild! They’re lost in the process of getting this thing, this monster [i.e., their grotesquely moving body] to, you know, 150% of “bad.” And I say, “Okay, let’s bring it back to 125%.” And then 100%, and very often at this point I will solo someone, so that everybody can see the process. So I’ll say, “Okay, Anne—,” [singling out] particularly people who are very grotesque. It’s great because then you can see—“and now 125%”—and then we go back. “Now do 100% again. And now let’s go to 95%.” Then I start bringing them down to 90, 80, 70, 50% of what they were doing.

PETER: Are you tricking them into dancing well?

RINDE: I’m tricking them into dancing well. [Pete guffaws again.] But there are two aspects of this. One is that I’m tricking them into dancing well—

PETER: And it’s working—

RINDE: And it’s working. They’re no longer thinking about dancing at all. It’s working because they’re not thinking about it. They’re not thinking about dancing at all. They’re just thinking about what they have to do to get the job done.

PETER: They’re working on fractions!

RINDE: They’re working on fractions, and their body is just responding, and finally we get down to like 5%. And you know, they’re moving—and you can’t see this, but—[Rinde demonstrates rhythmic full-body movement]. And I tell them, I want you to keep the image of what that was. In order for you to be acting at 5%, you have to have an idea of what that was initially. So you have to keep the image of the grotesque dance at 100% so that you understand what 5% is. So their minds are involved in this, and they start moving. And sometimes in these really tiny ways—it’s only 5%. But you see there’s an impulse in the body that’s like a shorthand of this large thing. And by now, the rest of the class is watching this dance, and they’re fascinated. It’s so clear, the rest of the room is completely rapt and they’re watching this dance. And I say, “Okay, let’s talk about this. We were all fascinated. It was clear everyone was completely absorbed in your movement. And why is that? What is it about that? I think at about 20%, this started getting really interesting, really good. And we all started to be in the project. We were waiting for the next chapter! So two things were going on: We were taking you to a point where your physical capacity matched completely the image you had in your head. In other words, you are dancing this well: your body is not out of balance. Your body is in balance.” And most of the time, people become extremely balanced. Their bodies look like they’re on the earth. They look like they’re balanced. It’s as if you said, “Just sway back and forth. Now less, less, less! You have to define how much weight goes one way, how much weight goes the other way. And you keep on narrowing it until—but what you’re doing is teaching yourself about balance.”

PETER: [Trying to describe the movement Rinde is demonstrating] So that’s kind of swaying like the pendulum of a grandfather clock or something like that.

RINDE: Exactly. Because you actually took the time to assess your balance point. And you didn’t think, I’m assessing my balance point. You thought, I’m going left and I’m going right, and now, I’m going less left and less right. But that’s an assessment right there. It’s less this direction and more that direction and less this direction, less that direction, less this direction. Finally, you’re balanced. But the project had nothing to do with your idea of balance. It’s like saying to someone who doesn't know how to relax, “Relax!” They don’t know how to relax, you know!

PETER: Well, sometimes even if you do know how to relax, at the point where somebody’s telling you to relax, that’s not first on your list!

RINDE: Exactly. That’s not first on your list.

[Interlude: “Monster Groove” by Rinde Eckert, from his version of Pericles]

[25:48]

RINDE: There was one other aspect. I turned to the rest of the students and I said, “There’s another aspect to this that we’re not thinking about that’s important, which is we just taught the audience how to see this dance. We taught you how to look at it. You knew how to look at this dance. You could enter it as an audience and be rapt.

PETER: So the audience in this case would be when you’re soloing people—

RINDE: The other students.

PETER: The other students who are watching [the solo dancers.]

RINDE: The students who are watching them, who now are fascinated by this dance. Now what if we go into a situation where you as an audience aren’t prepped and this is all you see? Depending on what you’re there to see—if you think you’re there to see Hamlet, you may be totally confused and not enter, refuse to enter. It’s just odd behavior. You’re not looking at it, you’re not letting it play on you. So how do we prepare people for this? How do we prepare people? Now this has integrity, this has real dance integrity, but if you don’t understand the context of it, can we see that integrity?

PETER: Integrity again is the wedding of intention and action.

RINDE: Yes, and actually there’s another aspect to it, which is ability, your actual ability to do it.

PETER: Well, this was the question I wanted to ask. So I’m sure it varied from class to class, but just in a generalized class, about how many people would be comfortable with dance, or movement? How many had formal training with that, as opposed to people who maybe just come at [the interdisciplinary class] more from an acting standpoint or something? How comfortable were they? When you talked about ability, this was my question: how self-conscious were they to begin with, in terms of using their bodies to express—

RINDE: Most of these people were not dancers. I had some dancers, and they were some of my favorite students because they understood the power of abstraction within the performance medium. They were happy with abstraction. They understood what the body can convey. They understood what space meant. So there were some [dancers], but it was a small fraction of them.

PETER: You know, this is what’s interesting. We were joking a little bit about the use of percentages and probabilities, but of course I think that probably served this very useful function of kind of short-circuiting the mind’s editing. I mean, you were talking about the mind-body relationship. If a kid goes into this and says like, “I’m not really a dancer,” there’s a way that you are giving them something else to think about—instead of that doubt or anxiety or neurosis even—while they do this exercise, and it frees them up. It kind of liberates them. Kind of?

RINDE: Yeah, I think one of the things that bad dancing always did was it liberated the dancers as well, because everyone was on the same footing. If you had a dancer, they had to figure it out: I have to dance badly and I’ve been trying to dance gracefully or well. I know how to dance! And then they would see that they’re not as good a bad dancer as some of the [non-dancers].

PETER: That’s a great point.

RINDE: We would do this regularly, actually. It was a way of neutralizing their prejudices, in a way, and putting them on equal footing.

[Interlude: “Polaroid” by Rinde Eckert]

[30:06]

TERRY: Hi, it’s Terry again. My wife Elizabeth and I met Peter and his wife Robyn when we were all touring Cuba in January 2019. A few weeks later, Peter shared with me the podcast episode he made while in Cuba, which he called “Learning from Cuba,” which particularly looked at education in that island nation. I’ve been listening to Point of Learning ever since, as I particularly like receiving the American take on U.S. education and related topics of interest. When he invited listeners to contribute a few dollars—or Euros, in my case—per month to the podcast, I signed up straight away because I enjoy hearing new and wide-ranging ideas about what and how and why we learn. If you’re tempted to make a contribution of any amount—either per month or just once—let me remind you of what my fellow countryman Oscar Wilde wrote some time ago. He said, “The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.” Back to the show! 

[VO]: Thanks, Terry. Go raibh maith agat! [“Thank you” in Irish, literally “May good be at you”] At the end of our conversation, Rinde presented another life lesson he drew from working on a scale, a B-flat major scale in this case. I want to highlight this example because of my most influential performing arts teacher when I was in high school, my violin teacher Thomas Halpin, star of Point of Learning episode 009. When I was having trouble with some passage in an étude (a study) or a concerto, Mr. Halpin liked to say, “A problem is still a problem until you can get into it and out of it.” For confronting technical problems, he proposed a method memorable for its three initial I’s: IDENTIFY, ISOLATE, INTEGRATE. This is so deep I’ve applied it to many other kinds of problems I’ve faced: First, IDENTIFY or name the problem you’re having; then ISOLATE it to repair it; then INTEGRATE it, making sure you can get into the passage and out of the passage successfully. Back to Rinde and that scale! 

[32:18]

RINDE: We were playing one passage and she said, “Well, I believe everything but the B-flat.” It was a scale. You know, I was just playing this [Rinde demonstrates the end of a B-flat major scale]. She said, “I believe everything but the B-flat, and why do you suppose that is? How do you feel about that?” And I said, “Yeah, I know. I don’t understand it. I don’t feel like I’m prepared for the B-flat.” And she said, “But the problem isn’t with the B-flat.” She said, “The problem started on G, and it manifested itself by the B-flat. So let’s solve the equation of the G to A. It started there.” And that’s a life lesson too. This is, you know, my problem with impatience: by the time impatience manifests itself, you know, the problem is already there. And I have to learn when that lack of consciousness begins. And sometimes it can be early, it can be like, Oh this is a concatenation of mistakes! It’s like I started out the day out of balance, and I never corrected. And now I’m just a train wreck. I’m waiting for the moment when I hit the penny on the tracks and everything goes off. And so it’s like, This started way back then, and I haven’t corrected. It reminds me of this thing in Horizon.

[VO]: Horizon is a dazzling performance piece Rinde developed in the early aughts where he plays a character based on the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. At one point the actors start to build the foundation of a wall, one cinderblock at a time.

RINDE: In the piece, there are these two ancient workers who are working on this foundation, which never actually gets built. But at one point—I believe that’s in there too—is that idea: if you think that the foundation is perfect and that you don’t have to make adjustments, then the higher you build, the more grotesque the intrinsic errors are going to be—the more they will manifest themselves until the thing topples over. Because you didn’t make the initial correction. Your assumption was that it was perfect. And so you didn’t bother making the corrections that you have to make as you build. You have to adjust for the fact that no layer of this foundation is going to be perfect. You’re gonna have to adjust for the flaws. It’s not gonna be the ideal thing that you think it is. And so it’s like that day. It’s like, Okay, this is the first layer of the foundation, and I’ve already started ignoring the flaws. So let’s look at the balance already, right away. I started doing something which was helpful at one point. I should get back to it, actually. Every morning I looked at the fish on my shower curtain. There’s this beautiful school of fish on the shower curtain. I said to myself, “You know nothing. You know nothing. This is a vast—”

PETER: This is your pep talk? Your affirmation?

RINDE: Yes, this is my pep talk: “You know nothing. Let’s start out with the acknowledgement that you have no idea. You are a fish in water. You are in the ocean, and the ocean is vast and unknowable and mysterious, and you can’t possibly grasp the enormity of this. So let’s start with that. You are an ignorant thing in the middle of a large ocean. So let’s start there. You know nothing about the piano. Now begin. So it’s Beginner’s Mind: begin. And then what you have to remember is that every minute of the day, there should be a recapitulation of your understanding of your own ignorance.

PETER: And acceptance of your own ignorance.

RINDE: And acceptance of it.

PETER: Right? And that’s okay. You know nothing, and that’s the way it is.

RINDE: And that way you’re not surprised [Pete laughs] when things don’t turn out, so therefore you’re less impatient because well, Of course! It didn’t happen the way I thought it would happen, but I was ready for that!

[37:25]

PETER: Before we move from the wall, the image kept coming to me of this wise old Mainer named Arthur—that of course is pronounced like “Ah-tha”—who was a friend of my dear friends, Al and Maureen. And he said at one point: “If the stones of the wall won’t fit together by themselves, no amount of mortar will make it work.”

RINDE: I love that!

PETER: You know, because that’s sometimes what we do. That’s such a beautiful image to me. I’ve never actually put it out into the world, so I may stick it in here somewhere. Just because I think that that’s what we do sometimes. We look at something and we’re like, Yeah, this isn’t gonna quite work, but maybe I just put a little bit more of this cement in here … and you’re like, No, you gotta make the stones fit together before—

RINDE: You have to take the time to look at the stones. You can’t just assume. Because that’s the thing about mortar: you stop looking at the shape of the stone because you think, Oh I’ve got the mortar. What do I need to look at the stone for? So you have to look at each stone, you have to say, What’s its shape? What’s its size? What’s its weight? How does it fit in here? What’s the negative space here? You have all these decisions to make that if you think, Ah, I’ve got mortar, I’ll just stick it together, you don’t get there! And you don't make a wall with any degree of beauty or integrity. And that’s what Adrienne was talking about. She said, “You have to play every note.” You have to play every note. Every note has to have that same degree of integrity. Every note is both the end of the journey and the impetus to go further.

[39:21]

[VO]: That’s it for today’s show! May you go much further with many beautiful notes, of your own or others’ making, to lighten your step. My great thanks to Rinde Eckert for talking with me and playing for us. In addition to musical illustrations from his 1966 Steinway grand piano, Rinde composed all the other pieces featured in this episode, except, of course, for intro and outro, furnished as always by Shayfer James, who will be playing in Toronto on Saturday, July 15, if you’re not too far away and weren’t able to catch him on his recent international and U.S. tours. Now here’s the thing, you guys: if you’re not my mom—hi, Mom!—you probably listen to a range of other podcasts, and you may have noticed the team of editors, mixers, producers, sound engineers, et al. listed at the end of every episode. For Point of Learning, it’s just me. Now I love making these shows, and heaven knows, it takes me long enough to get them ready for you! But that’s because I want them to sound great, and be relevant whenever you listen—unless you already missed Shayfer’s Toronto gig, in which case I’m sorry about that. But my point is: please go ahead and share this episode with anyone you think would especially appreciate Rinde’s take on art and life. My most effective marketing team is you. Thanks for listening, and thanks for your support. I’m Peter Horn, and I’ll be back at you just as soon as I can with another episode all about what and how and why we learn! See you then!

[41:01]

RINDE: I’m gonna carry that image of the wall with me, that wall that you were talking about, your Maine friend Arthur, because it’s such a simple and beautiful way of describing that process of education. And it goes back to this instrument, these instruments and the movement, and all of the things that I’m talking about. It’s all about the individual stone and the space that that’s gonna go into. And then it’s like: Take it in! Take it in! And, you know, see it! And then you have a chance. If you don’t see it, then you don’t have a chance.

PETE: That’s gorgeous, man. I love it!

Batter Down the Walls Transcript (042)

MARTHA GROUP: Hi! This is Martha Group, Superintendent of the Vernon Verona Sherrill Central School District in the heart of Central New York, and you are at the Point of Learning with my friend Peter Horn. Pete and I are currently working on a project to learn from the students in my district what they really think about their experience in school and how school could be better for them, so I’m pleased to introduce Pete’s conversation with Jonathan Kozol, an author and education advocate who has kept kids’ ideas about school and their ideas about themselves and their lives outside of school at the center of his work for nearly 60 years. Please enjoy the show!

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today’s show, Jonathan Kozol on the value of listening to students ...

JONATHAN KOZOL: I still listen to the children’s words whenever I’m in a classroom. Where did I get that tendency? It just seemed natural to me. Their language seemed so much more interesting than what I call “expert language.”

[VO]: An inter-district integration program with a 57-year record of success that should be a model throughout the U.S.

KOZOL: This is a beautiful example of what America could be. And with adequate national backing, including ample federal funding to incentivize more metro areas to do this, we could strike a mighty blow against apartheid education in America.

[VO]: And some aims of education ... 

KOZOL: I’d always want to talk about making education beautiful as well as useful, that there’s more to life than corporate utility. There’s also elegance and whim and wonderment!

[VO]: Psyched to read Jonathan’s latest book Batter Down the Walls? Well, you can’t—yet. But you can stick around for a sneak preview. Coming right up!

[02:46]

[VO]: A Rhodes Scholar, former fourth grade teacher, and passionate advocate for child-centered learning, Jonathan Kozol is one of the most widely read and highly honored education writers in the nation. His first book, Death at an Early Age, a description of his first year as a teacher, received the National Book Award in 1968. The book that electrified me and many of my peers when I was first considering teaching was Savage Inequalities, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992. In his 2005 book The Shame of the Nation, which describes conditions that he found in nearly 60 public schools, Jonathan wrote that inner-city children were more isolated racially than at any time since Brown v. Board of Education. In subsequent books, and in his recent lectures, he describes the sensitive and skillful ways that good, enlightened teachers resist the harsh and punitive mentality that stifles curiosity and substitutes the fear of failure for the joy that ought to be a healthy part of learning. In our conversation on today’s show, Jonathan offers a sneak preview of his latest book, not yet in print, called Batter Down the Walls. In it he makes a compelling argument that children have a right to be protected from the robotic methods of instruction and destructive forms of discipline that have been accepted in all too many schools that serve our poorest kids of color. Jonathan believes we need to reimagine the aims of education as something more than “testable proficiencies.” Indeed it needs to be a cultural awakening that empowers children with critical discernment of an unjust status quo and with the will to batter down the racist walls that make us strangers to each other. I reached Jonathan at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts by phone in mid-January.

[04:46]

PETER: We happen to be speaking on Martin Luther King Day. As I think about Dr. King’s legacy in the context of this conversation, two coincidences are top of mind for me. First, I believe Dr. King’s work was a very real influence in your choice to become a teacher, in 1964. You consulted with a Boston-based colleague of Dr. King’s who asked you to consider teaching in Boston’s segregated schools as one way to participate in the civil rights struggle. But I also believe that in recent years, you have visited several schools named for Dr. King. Could I ask you to begin with a description of one of those schools, either in Boston or elsewhere?

JONATHAN: Sure. I might begin by saying I’ve just completed a new book, and the book is called Batter Down the Walls. And in this book, I talk about the intense and increasing racial isolation of Black and Latino children. And in passing, at one point I describe a school in Boston that I visited, which is named for Dr. Martin Luther King. Like so many of these schools that bear his name, there’s a lot of irony involved, because this is a school in the Roxbury-Dorchester area of Boston, which is the heart of the Black community. And the school is almost totally Black and Latino. I think the principal told me she has maybe 12 White children in the school of about 500 kids. And you know, it’s a school that’s been perennially on various state watch lists. And many of these schools are under threat of state takeovers and things like that. The school is very old. Rundown. I remember when it was renamed for Dr. King in 1968 upon his death. He had actually spoken on the front steps of the school around 1964 to a crowd of parents and ministers and other activists who were struggling for an end to the intense segregation of the schools. And when I visited, it was a very tired-looking building. In one class I visited, you could see there was a hole in the ceiling. You know, you could see the pipes with their lining in the hole above my head as I stood there. And in another classroom—it was an old science lab, but most of the lab equipment had been stripped out—and it was a very long, narrow room. I sat in the back row next to a couple of teenage girls, and they could barely hear the teacher because of the way the room was laid out and because lab tables take up so much space. The two girls sitting next to me were fiddling with their cell phone. I don’t blame them because they couldn’t even see what was on the board from that point [in the room]. On the website of the school, it said, The Martin Luther King Jr. K-8 School is something like the fulfillment of the dream. So, you know, that’s what I mean by ironies.

PETER: Wow.

[09:09]

JONATHAN: You know, I’m trying in my new book, which I hope will go to print by the fall, I’m hoping also to sort of open up a separate issue from racial isolation. And that is, in many of segregated schools, it’s not simply a matter of physical isolation of minority children, but there’s also been the evolution of what I call a disparate agenda, a different curriculum, basically a whole different mode of discipline. Highly punitive: silence in the classroom, silence when filing in the hallways, lists of misbehaviors, and lists of penalties for each misbehavior. I mean, even really good teachers who hate all this stuff have no choice about enforcing this. It’s all test-driven. You know, in one of these schools, there was a rule for children—no questions—and curiosity was suppressed, of course, because that might lead the children off track from the lesson that was drilling them for an upcoming exam. It’s like the kids are perceived as if they were a different species of humanity from White middle-class children in America. I contrast this with some really good, integrated public schools in what are called cross-district integration programs, where children from the city, if their parents so wish, are allowed to ride the bus, you know, often just 30 minutes, sometimes it’s a longer ride, in order to go to some of the best and well-funded suburban schools. In many of the older buildings in segregated districts, the physical disrepair is—it’s not merely depressing, as it was at the MLK school. It’s also dangerous: Crumbling lead paint in many of these buildings. Children cannot safely drink the water in thousands of these schools, because of ancient lead and copper piping. Out in these beautiful suburban schools, you know, usually they’re up to date. They may not be brand new buildings, but they’re in good repair. And the atmosphere is cheerful. The inner-city kids are not seen as if they were uniquely different. The words I tend to hear in some of these inner-city schools from principals—well, they probably wouldn’t use the word deficit, but that’s really what it amounts to: they see the children as deficit commodities. I never sensed that out in these good urban- suburban integration programs.

[VO]: Again, this is an exclusive preview of Jonathan Kozol’s next book Batter Down the Walls, hopefully available as soon as Fall 2023. The first half of the book focuses mostly on inner-city schools, but the in the second half of the book Jonathan describes effective inter-district integration programs. Perhaps his favorite is METCO, as in Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity, founded by parents and educators in the suburbs of Boston in the mid-‘60s, in collaboration with the NAACP. The Metropolitan Council advocated for a state funding stream for any town wishing to enroll Boston students in that town’s own public schools in order to address racial isolation. In 1966 the first 220 students, ages 5 to 16, were bussed from Boston neighborhoods to schools in Arlington, Braintree, Brookline, Lexington, Lincoln, Newton, and Wellesley. Initial funding came from the United States Department of Education and the Carnegie Corporation. Jonathan himself taught in METCO for two years.

JONATHAN: So ultimately, we opened the program up to approximately 32 suburban districts surrounding Boston. And the program is still going strong today. It involves about 3000 children. I argue in the book that ought to be mightily expanded and ought to be taken as a model for the nation. It’s not without its challenges because, you know, the children are going into a world that’s very different from the one in which they’ve grown up. But they start the program early. I know lots of kids who entered the program when they were in kindergarten or first grade. The children seem to reach across the lines of class and race far more easily than grownups do. They make good friends. And at the same time, in the best of these schools—the ones that are most sensitive—a lot of effort has been made to make certain that the curriculum and the books that are used and the atmosphere in general are respectful of the cultural values that these children bring with them. They don’t see them as deficit children. They see them as children who have gifts to bring. The Black children in the program have been academically successful in ways that one almost never sees in the inner cities. I think the latest statistic I saw was that 95% of the METCO kids graduate from high school in four years—maybe even slightly more than that. And virtually all of them go on to some form of higher education.

[VO]: Jonathan told the story of a METCO alumnus who returned, after earning a college degree and no small success as a professional blues and jazz musician, to teach in his old school for three years.

JONATHAN: I visited his class, an African American man. He was playing Southern blues to a class of little kids who were sitting around him in a circle: White, Black, Latino, some Asian children. And he was explaining to them how the blues followed the path of Black migration Northwood to Chicago. Just a lovely example of really beautiful multiracial education. You know, not just the ritualistic use of one poem by Langston Hughes! I raise the question of why our national leaders don’t look at a program like this and say, This is a beautiful example of what America could be. And with adequate national backing, including ample federal funding to incentivize more metro areas to do this, we could strike a mighty blow against apartheid education in America.

[18:39]

PETER: As an educator who loves working with kids, what I find most compelling when you write about school is the way that you center the lives and voices of the students. So my first exposure to your ideas was your 1991 bestseller Savage Inequalities, where you lay out explicitly that because you realized that the voices of children were so often missing from the national conversation about education, you made it a point throughout your reporting for that book “to listen very carefully” to students, and wherever possible to “let their voices and their judgments and their longings find a place within this book, and maybe too within the nation’s dialogue about their destinies” [p. 6]. So I wanted to ask, was there an aha moment for you when you realized like, Hey, we are systematically missing the voices of these key stakeholders in our school system?

JONATHAN: Well, I don’t think there was any sudden moment like that. I just, from the beginning, you know, I began, as I said, teaching in that miserable school in Boston that I described in Death at an Early Age. Right from the beginning, I found the voices of the children, even when they described something awful, that it was still invigorating language. You know, it’s vital language.

PETER: So as you know, this is now called student voice. Student voice is the academic term for students’ perceptions, especially about school, in their own words. And I happened to be rereading two weeks ago, what I think is one of the best journal articles on this topic by Alison Cook-Sather at Bryn Mawr. And she credits you and this introduction with igniting the scholarly interest in students’ perceptions of school. It would seem that it had not really occurred to researchers before then, as it still regrettably does not occur to many educators, to ask students directly what they think about school and how it could be better.

JONATHAN: I don’t even like the phrase “student voice” because I mean, with all respect for the author you quoted, who I assume must be wonderful because she quoted me—I’m just joking!— I don’t like the tendency of education experts to what I call reify every idea by coming up with a new trendy phrase for it. So “student voice” I guess is the current word for what I just would call listening to kids and and taking pleasure in their often very funny way of stating things—and sometimes heartbreaking way: I’m thinking of a child in an elementary school in the South Bronx … she wrote me a letter. That’s it, the teacher sent me a bunch of letters from the class, and one of the children, a little girl, was comparing her school to a school that she thought I probably had gone to since I was a White privileged man. And she said, “You have clean things. We do not have”—she didn't finish the second sentence. Just “You have clean things. We do not have”—that, to me, is more powerful than any thousand words from some academic expert on inequality. And I still listen to the children’s words whenever I’m in a classroom. Where did I get that tendency? As I said, it just seemed natural to me. Their language seemed so much more interesting than what I call “expert language.” I just sometimes wish you could plunk some of these kids down in an education graduate program for a moment and just let them ramble on for a few minutes and sort of wake up the experts!

[VO]:  Jonathan cited as someone who taught him a great deal about listening none other than Mister Rogers. Yes, that Mister Rogers, the longtime creator of and advocate for high-quality programming for children. Jonathan writes about their friendship in his forthcoming book, but gives us a little taste here.

JONATHAN: Fred Rogers. Fred became a friend of mine mostly in the last decade of his life. He went with me to go and listen to children in the Bronx. I took him to a school that I’d been writing about, but one where the principal was a little more progressive than others, and where she loved the idea of having Mister Rogers coming and talking to her little kids, and some of the teachers wept! They were so moved to see Fred Rogers squeeze his bottom into those little chairs, you know, and he was very good at not only eliciting children’s questions, but letting them ramble on as as long as they wanted. I miss him terribly.

[25:04]

HEATHER CARSON-WAKE: Hello, this is Heather Carson-Wake, a reading specialist and literacy coach in the Buffalo Public Schools and a proud supporter of the Point of Learning podcast! My grandfather sent me a copy of Savage Inequalities 30 years ago, after he heard Jonathan Kozol on PBS speaking about the sad state of the schools he had visited. My grandfather knew I had just begun my career in teaching, and his gift of Kozol’s book led to many enlightening conversations between us that I will always cherish. Speaking of conversations, conversations like the one I’m interrupting right now—just for a second, I promise—are why I support this show all about what and how and why we learn. Yes, I’m a teacher, but this podcast is for anyone curious about big ideas—like how we make education better for all kiddos—that really matter to everyone. If you’re able to kick in a few dollars a month or a one-time contribution of any amount, click the link in the show’s notes. Thank you, and back to Pete’s conversation with Jonathan Kozol!  

PETER: Probably the savage inequality that maybe is at the center of that book is this disparity of funding between wealthy communities and poor communities based on property taxes. You know, that’s the way that that works. If you could wave a wand and change one thing about U.S. education, would it be the way that schools are funded? I heard you when you were talking about METCO, for example, infusing it with a lot more federal dollars.

JONATHAN: If I had a magic wand, I think I would start with what I call the elephant in the middle of the room, which is apartheid education. And I would do anything I could to encourage school districts to open up the gates. I think White kids benefit every bit as much as the poorest Black and Latino kids do when they can learn together. And I deeply regret that President Biden, for whom I naturally voted—that he’s always turned his back on school integration. And he tries to thread the needle by saying—he used to say he was in favor of integration, but he was opposed to bussing. So I thought, Well, that’s intellectually quite fascinating: to be in favor of integration, but opposed to the one and only way by which to make it possible! I still regret that he’s never repented of the years and years in which he added a stigma to the word bussing. And he was very good at doing that because when, when the Southern racists—the Southern senators with whom he allied himself—when they, when they condemned bussing, you know, it had the taint of Southern racism. But when Biden did it in his more civilized style, it had a lasting impact.

[VO]: I hope you’ll indulge me this bit of historical recording, because I’ve been very attuned to Jonathan’s published writing and public appearances over the last several years, hoping at some point he’d be a guest on the show. On June 6th, 2019 The Nation magazine published an op-ed by Kozol lambasting then-Candidate Biden for collaborating with segregationists as a staunch opponent to bussing kids from Black and brown neighborhoods to wealthier White schools. Exactly three weeks later, this infamous moment occurred during a Democratic presidential debate. The speaker, then the junior senator from California, is now Vice President Kamala Harris:

KAMALA HARRIS: And I’m gonna now direct this at Vice President Biden. I do not believe you are a racist, and I agree with you when you commit yourself to the importance of finding common ground. But I also believe—and it is personal, and I was actually very—it was hurtful to hear you talk about the reputations of two United States senators who built their reputations and career on the segregation of race in this country. And it was not only that, but you also worked with them to oppose bussing. And, you know, there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bussed to school every day. And that little girl was me.

[VO]: The historical sidebar has concluded. Back to the show!

[29:46]

JONATHAN: If I had two magic wands, the second one would be to alter entirely the way we finance education in America. And in that respect, I haven’t changed in my view since Savage Inequalities. So long as we base the primary source of funding on local wealth, local property, we will never have equal education in America. In my belief, school funding ought to be a national obligation. Money to fund our public schools should come from the real wealth of the nation, which is to say from the federal government. You know, kids don’t go to school and each morning in schools where they still say the pledge, they don’t say a pledge to the State of New Hampshire. They say a pledge to the flag of the United States, one nation, indivisible. And I just cringe when I think of the deception that we’re conveying to children when we ask them to speak those words. If we’re going to say the pledge, I think we need to revise it. I would certainly make it clear that the words of the pledge are aspirational, that they don’t describe the nation in which we live today. But as I say, my book ends on a more hopeful note. I know something that works because I’ve seen it. And I taught in METCO for two years myself, by the way—but I follow it to the present day. I know a little girl right now who’s not only doing wonderfully academically, but her White classmates, some of them from the suburbs come into Roxbury sometimes on weekends and stay for sleepovers. Good God! In this nation, which is torn apart by hatred and fear of each other, this is the kind of model we should treasure. You know, I won’t live to see it—I’m 86 now—but I just hope that there’s a day when we can break down these walls and instead of thinking of this as an exceptional program of inter-district integration, create entire metro area school districts, in which the city district and suburban districts are open to each other. We could also create such marvelous magnet schools within the cities that a lot of the suburban kids will make the ride in reverse. Especially in this area around Boston, you know, with Boston’s incredible research community, bio labs and great and world-famous hospitals. Also, its rich theatrical life and artistic cultural centers, great art museums, including Black history museums, but also, you know, all the treasures of the Renaissance in some of these beautiful museums here. You know, we could create incredible magnet schools affiliated with these institutions, you know, including internships and the famous children’s hospital in Boston. You know, I just think the possibility is there and that’s why end the book on an optimistic note.

[33:44]

JONATHAN: I’ve added an epilogue to my new book, a great long, which is called “A Letter to the Future.” The whole theme of the epilogue is that the humanities are being left out to dry—dry and die!—in all too many schools in the United States because there’s this cult of teaching literacy as a science but divorcing it entirely from literature. I quote a teacher in Virginia who had a wonderful background in literature and wanted to bring in some really good novels to her fifth-grade kids but she wasn’t allowed to do this because the entire curriculum was built upon tiny little snippets of writing that were called “text passages,” which were basically practice tests. And they do this for like six weeks before every exam. So I wrote this epilogue from the heart of somebody who’s been immersed in the humanities my whole life. You know, I majored in literature as an undergrad at Harvard and then briefly at Oxford. And I think that if we simply reduce literacy to a mechanistic skill, we’re falling into a dangerous trap. Yes, of course we need kids to read, we need to teach phonics and all the basic skills of sounding out words and then comprehending them. But I think it’s sort of like cultural starvation if we leave out the richness of The Very Hungry Caterpillar and The Grouchy Lady Bug and for older kids, A Wrinkle in Time and Number the Stars, and for still older kids, The Bluest Eye, and maybe The Bear of Faulkner. I treasure all that. And I think that whatever the race and cultural background of the child, they’re going to be kind of impoverished if they grow into adulthood without any of this. It’s going to make very narrow citizens, I think. I’d say it’s a kind of brittle literacy, a culturally hungry literacy.

PETER: Right. Well we can point again to the division, you know, where rich kids will be able to think about ideas and poor kids will be able to think about skills. Or text [passages] as you say.

JONATHAN: Yeah, these things are just awful. They’re so boring. When I used to lecture more often—because I don’t travel now; I do lectures by Zoom—when the college would ask me for a title, if I was kind of lazy and wasn’t sure what I was really going to say by the time I got there, I would say I’m going to lecture on joy and justice. And justice had a great deal to do with what amounts to apartheid in our public schools and the pretense of urban school officials that they can achieve perfectible apartheid—high-scoring apartheid. So, you know, that would be the justice part of it. But the joy part of it, I’d always want to talk about making education beautiful as well as useful, that there is more to life than corporate utility. There’s also elegance and whim and wonderment!

[VO]: Amen! That’s it for today’s show. Thanks so much to Jonathan Kozol for joining me. His next book Batter Down the Walls will be available everywhere, hopefully as soon as this fall. Thanks as always to Shayfer James for intro and outro music. Having recently performed throughout Southeast Asia, Australia, Europe and the UK, Shayfer is beginning a U.S. tour as this episode drops, and he just released his new album Shipwreck, which features some string tracks by a fiddler called Peter Horn. Check out shayferjames.com for all the details. Special thanks for music on this episode to pianist Gil Scott Chapman and guitarist Josh Lerner. A former student of mine, Josh is now an educator and academic leader based in Chicago who recalls being addressed by Kozol’s work when he was first studying to be a teacher. Gil was never formally my student, though he remains Exhibit A for why, if at all possible, you should get a baby grand piano donated to your English classroom. Someone nearly as gifted as Gil may wander in one day to ask if they can try it out. Finally, thanks to you for listening, rating, reviewing, and supporting this show however you can. If you can think of just one person who would especially appreciate this episode—maybe a teacher?—please send them a link! It will mean most coming from you. Point of Learning is written, recorded, edited, mixed, and mastered by me here in Sunny Buffalo, New York. I’m Peter Horn, and I’ll be back at you in a month or so with a brand new episode featuring Grammy-winning performance artist Rinde Eckert. You’re gonna love it, so see you then!  

Dad's Last Sermon Transcript (041)

PETER HORN: Hello, it's Pete. The 25th of January 2023 marks the 25th anniversary of my father's death, and by a strange, and—I've always thought—beautiful coincidence, the 25th anniversary of his final sermon. On the last Sunday in January, 1998, the Rev. Gilbert J. Horn, Co-Pastor of the Montview Boulevard Presbyterian Church in Denver read the gospel lesson and then preached on it for two church services and taught a Sunday school class before succumbing to esophageal cancer at home that afternoon. He was 57. But back to church that morning, where today's audio was captured. It happened to be Super Bowl Sunday, and the Denver Broncos would be facing the Green Bay Packers in San Diego in a few hours [Super Bowl XXXII]. From the standpoint of a preacher in Denver trying to get Denver congregants in the pews, this was a challenge. What was my dad's marketing solution? Exploiting the familiar trope of the football player who tells the sports reporter that Jesus is his quarterback, Dad titled his sermon "Jesus' Playbook."

[04:08]

PETE: My dad learned the value of the Jewish tradition of yahrzeit from the rabbis who were among his closest friends. Yahrzeit is the Yiddish word meaning the anniversary of a death, a time to slow down, light a candle, and consider the life and legacy of a loved one. This month, approaching my dad's 25th yahrzeit, I knew I wanted to do something special to mark the occasion. I really wanted to listen to the tape of his last sermon again, which I did for maybe the first dozen or so January 25ths after he died, but the cassette tape it was captured on—not high-quality to begin with—was so frail that it nearly broke the last time I tried, so I was a little scared. Fortunately, my exceedingly thoughtful wife Robyn not too long ago gave me a piece of audio equipment expressly for the purpose of digitizing my old analog cassettes, so I figured, "Why not give it a shot?" As you know already, it worked! Blessings abound!

What you'll hear in just a moment is not only my father's final sermon, but probably his best, insofar as it encapsulated—in just over 16 minutes—the most important elements of his theology as it had evolved over years of continuing study and continuous effort to put the gospel into practice. Beginning in 1965, the Rev. Gilbert J. Horn served Presbyterian churches in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Buffalo, before beginning work in 1986 as Executive Director of the Colorado Council of Churches. During his seven years with the Council, he initiated new ministries in inter-religious dialogue, environmental awareness, health care reform, economic justice, and racial inclusivity. In 1993, he  became Co-Pastor at Montview Boulevard Presbyterian Church in Denver, where he preached this sermon.

Now what about sharing my dad's last sermon via podcast? On the one hand, this is my own family's anniversary I'm drawing you all into, which may seem a little strange. On the other hand, Dad never shied away from an audience! A sermon, after all, is a public performance, and I know he would have loved to have all you beautiful folk in the congregation! On the morning of the day he died, one of his Sunday school students, who knew Dad been suffering with cancer for some months, reportedly complimented him on how well he looked. "That," my father replied, "is because I'm a showman!" If you listen carefully to the recording, which I've done my best to clean up, you can hear his labored breathing. Certain words and phrases carry extra weight if you believe, as I do, that he knew his last hours were at hand. All the more reason, I think, to pass these words along! Once in a while I worry that I've created the impression among Point of Learning listeners that my dad was just someone who sat around reading A Christmas Carol all the time! What follows is far more representative of his life's work—and as timely a message today as it was 25 years ago.

One last prefatory note: Dad refers at one point to a quotation by a noted football coach that he's included in the bulletin. I can't seem to locate the bulletin in my files, but the spirit of the quote is something like the line attributed to Vince Lombardi, "Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing." This will make sense later, I promise! Anyway, here's Dad reading the gospel lesson that he takes as his principal text, and then moving right into "Jesus' Playbook." 

[08:07]

[GILBERT HORN reads the Gospel Lesson, Luke 4.14-21.]

[10:00]

[GIL preaches “Jesus’ Playbook.” Click the button to view a PDF of the printed version Dad prepared for sharing with the congregation (standard practice of the co-pastors at Montview). As somebody who’s had the opportunity to review the tape many times during the production of this episode, I can say it’s fun for me to see the places Dad adjusted this language in delivery. A few notes fall below the button.]

Sermon Notes:

• 10:23 The Jesus Seminar refers to a group of about 150 biblical scholars and laymen active in the 1980s and 1990s devoted to determining the historical accuracy of the words and sayings of Jesus.

• 10:43 Both of our lessons today. The Epistle Lesson for the Third Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year C) [a.k.a. 1/25/98] was I Corinthians 12.12-31a.

• 16:06 Ecumenical Sunday. Dad was a self-described “Ecu-maniac,” referring to his zeal that different Christian denominations—but beyond that, different religions—should find ways to get to know each other better and collaborate.

• 22:05 The reason I put that obnoxious quote from a noted football coach. I’m still going with Vince Lombardi on this one, but I’ve got a field agent trying to see if she can track down the bulletin. The correction will be posted here.

[26:26]

PETE: Amen, and that's it for today's show! If you're curious, the Broncos won 31-24, even though the Packers were favored by 11. As I said, Blessings Abound! Thanks to my family for supporting this choice to share the final sermon. Thanks as always to Shayfer James for intro and outro music. Montview organist Barbara Hulac played the chimes. Thanks to you for listening, rating (5 stars), reviewing, and supporting the show any way you can—including sharing. Point of Learning is written, recorded, edited, mixed, and mastered by me here in Sunny Buffalo, New York. I'm Peter Horn, and I'll be back soon with author and education advocate Jonathan Kozol speaking about his forthcoming book Batter Down the Walls!

Ancient Greeks on War Transcript (039)

RYAN DALY: Hello. This is Ryan Daly, and you are at the Point of Learning with my friend and former colleague Peter Horn. I’m a social studies teacher concerned that the war in Ukraine is slipping from our public awareness, so I’m very interested that Pete will be focusing on the topic of war and its impact on combatants and survivors in his conversation today with playwright Ellen McLaughlin about her work creating new versions of ancient Greek plays. Enjoy the show!

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today’s show, playwright Ellen McLaughlin, who has breathed new life into ancient Greek texts:

ELLEN McLAUGHLIN: Every Greek play involves a series of ethical questions that are unanswerable, and yet engage us on the deepest level with a reckoning with the self, with society, with the gods, with—they ask the hardest questions, always.

[VO]: We talk about what we inherit from a cluster of playwrights who were veterans of war, writing for war veterans in their audience:

McLAUGHLIN: You can’t lie about that to the people who actually experienced it. They know what happened. So it keeps the playwright honest, and it means that the playwright has a real-world experience of the wars that they’re talking about.

[VO]:Women may or may not have attended ancient plays, but they inspired some of the plays’ most complex and powerful characters:

McLAUGHLIN: As a feminist, when you approach the Greeks, you’re always approaching difficulty. All of these characters—these great, great female characters—are difficult in various ways.

[VO]:And we explore some theological dimensions of a polytheistic religion nobody practices anymore:

McLAUGHLIN: The gods—because they are eternal and profoundly not human—don’t fundamentally understand us, or really have that much interest in us as humans. And that makes sense to me.

[VO]:All that and much more, with Ellen McLaughlin at the Point of Learning. Let’s go!

[VO]: If you own a textbook on the history of theatre, chances are good that there is an iconic photo of Ellen McLaughlin the actor, who originated the role of the Angel in Tony Kushner’s landmark Angels in America, which won successive Tony Awards for each of its two parts in 1993 and 1994. I’m profoundly grateful to Ellen the actor for the performances I’ve been lucky enough to see as an audience member, and for the one I shared as her scene partner in 1999 at the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English, with her as a resident artist and me as a student who’d managed to win a bit part. But today I’ll be talking with Ellen the playwright, who has been aptly described by her friend Tony Kushner as a “dramatist of courage, intelligence, wit and lyricism.” Her plays have been produced off-Broadway, regionally, and internationally. She is the recipient of the Writer’s Award from the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund—which we’ll talk about, because she cooked up an amazing project—as well as other honors, including the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the Helen Merrill Award for Playwriting, and grants from the NEA. Plays and operas include: Tongue of a Bird, Iphigenia and Other Daughters, The Persians, Penelope, Ajax in Iraq, Septimus and Clarissa, Blood Moon, and The Oresteia. She has taught in several programs, including the Yale School of Drama, Princeton University, and the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English. She has taught playwriting at Barnard College since 1995. One last note before we get into it: we spoke at her gorgeous home not far from New York City in late summer, when it seemed like every landscaper in the neighborhood was out getting yards ready for Labor Day celebrations. With some listening equipment, you may detect a leaf-blower or two. On the plus side, the birds outside Ellen’s office window seemed to croon appropriately ancient tunes.

[5:02]

HORN: I called you last spring to gauge your interest in doing a podcast conversation focusing on just one subset of your work, the versions of ancient Greek plays based on, or corresponding to, those famous works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides that many of us read in high school—eight of them, seven tragedies, and then the Aristophanes comedy Lysistrata, are collected on a volume called straightforwardly The Greek Plays. And I just learned that there will be a second collection published sometime in the coming year. Familiar only with your Oedipus, which I used with my own students about ten years ago when I was teaching high school, I found myself reaching for the book in the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, because war is the context, if not the subject of so much Greek drama. And then I couldn’t put the volume down. I read it straight through, some plays more than once, in the next several days. The preface that you wrote reminded me of something I hadn’t focused on since my days as a Classics major in college, which is that the audiences for those original plays contained a large number—perhaps a majority—of veterans. All three of the major tragic playwrights were themselves veterans. As you put it. “This fact alone—that the plays were written by veterans, and largely for veterans—makes whatever these playwrights have to say about war particularly worthy of our attention, since we haven't had that kind of dynamic between playwrights and their audiences in theatrical literature since” [The Greek Plays, p. xvii].

McLAUGHLIN: I’ve been thinking about this a lot, because I was asked to give a speech at the University of Pennsylvania, specifically in relationship to a wonderful program that they do there, which is working with veterans and having them read and work on Greek plays. I’ve been wondering why, as a child of two academics, neither of whom served—and somebody who rarely knew people who were active members of the military—why so much of my work has had to do with war. Very little military history within my own family. It’s just not what my legacy has been. But I did have a babysitter when I was growing up, Billy Henshaw, who was one of those kids—he was a kind young man, like maybe 14 or 15 when he was taking care of us every now and then. And a funny kid, and a kid who has a level of integrity and decency that is remarkable. And we loved him. He taught me how to blow into a grass harp, and he taught me a lot of really stupid jokes and, you know, that sort of thing. And then he was drafted and he went to Vietnam. He was there for almost two years and he came back in a wheelchair and he was an entirely different person. He had been—that child had been destroyed in Vietnam.

[VO]: Ellen is about to relate a fairly graphic description of a combat injury. If you would prefer not to hear it just now, skip ahead 60 seconds.

McLAUGLIN: He had been in a firefight and had received a Purple Heart [medal] for what he did, which was to go back into the firefight—he saved several people, but he was also injured when he was doing that. He was strapped onto the top of a jeep in the middle of the firefight. And then the panicky kid who was driving the medical jeep was just trying to get all of these bodies off of the field. And the jeep stalled, and all of the bodies fell off. But he didn’t know that because he was in a live firefight, and he backed over all of the bodies. And that was where Billy’s worst injuries were. He’d broken his back and he would never walk again. And that was the year of the great Moratorium in Washington DC which is where I grew up.

[VO]: So this is the fall of 1969, and the Moratorium had two parts: the massive demonstration and teach-in in October 1969 prompted President Nixon to give the famous speech asking what he called the “silent majority” of U.S. citizens to support his policies in Vietnam. The march in November drew over half a million participants, a sign that the anti-war movement was growing.

[10:16]

McLAUGHLIN: I was 13, and somehow I managed to be with Billy when he went to the White House. I was across the street, and he met with a whole bunch of veterans and they stood around—many of them were wounded [in Vietnam]—they stood around and they talked for a little while, inaudibly to those of us who were watching. And as they were talking, a large—I mean, it was a lot of people [who were there for the Moratorium],but a large, large crowd gathered to watch them. And then they took all of their medals and they threw them over the White House fence. And I remember the look of the medals in the air and that they shone; they glittered, and then fell onto the lawn and just looked like sort of glittery trash. And it was this silent thing. These men had agreed to do this, and it was a private thing, but it was also an act of public—It was a civic act, a public protest. It was something that they were doing for themselves, but they were doing it in front of the world. And it was—I think that my engagement with the notion of What do we owe veterans? and What is the veteran experience? —that engagement with those questions began then. And it’s continued throughout my life. And I don’t know what ever happened to Billy, but I feel that if I were ever to run into him again, I would be able to say, You know, much of what I’ve done in my life has been dedicated to you and what I could understand of the suffering that you experienced. So I think that that’s where I start. I identified that that’s where I start with the Greeks, and what I appreciate so much is that clear-eyed sense that the Greeks have about war—of the horror of it, the exhilaration of it, and the pity of it. And the ravages, not only to the people who are its obvious victims, but to the veterans themselves. I mean, the Greeks are very clear about that, as is evidenced by the fact that, you know, the Greeks who were the ostensibly the “winners” of the Trojan War—it doesn’t go well for the great heroes of that war when they try to go home. And I think that that’s something that Greek warriors understood, and that the veteran poets who wrote the plays really were able to express how difficult it is to make that journey back into the circle of the ordinary human, the civic circle. The Greeks put great value on that because you need those citizens to make the society run properly. And so those warriors who were coming back from the war, traumatized in the way that veterans are—which is inevitable—and only linked to each other … that’s the thing that war does, is that it creates this incredibly intense community of—in their case, brother, and in future wars, brothers and sisters who understand something about each other because they understand something about combat—what it costs. And there is a way in which, you know, civilians just simply don’t—we don't get it. There is this sense that if the society, the democracy is to survive, you have to bring these people back into the fold of a sense of community action and a sense of being engaged with the community, caring about what happens to the people stateside, you know, the people who are back home trying to live their lives. And one of the ways you do that is through the civic act, which is getting everybody to go see a play which deals with these issues. You sit in a theater, in the safety of the community, of the audience, and you watch terrible things happen to people on stage and are able, in that strange alchemy that the theater creates, to empathize with those people without feeling that you yourself are endangered by the terrible things that are happening for them. But every Greek play involves a series of ethical questions that are unanswerable and yet engage us on the deepest level with a reckoning with the self, with society, with the gods, with—they ask the hardest questions, always. And in the darkness of the audience experience, where you’re sitting cheek by jowl with thousands of strangers and you are all having this experience of watching this happen to the others, the actors, the characters up there, in that moment of active compassion—activated compassion—you become part of the larger community of the human. And I think that that was part of the genius of the program that the Greeks were able to effect for returning veterans. And I think the writing of the plays was a part of that project, but I think definitely the attendance at plays was part of that project, to take a soldier and turn that soldier into a citizen of a democracy. But at the same time, because everybody’s been through that experience: I think you could say that pretty much everybody who’s watching those plays—we don’t know a lot about who is in the audience in classic Greek theater. We don’t know, for instance, whether women were allowed to attend at all. But we know that for instance, when Aeschylus’ play The Persians was being produced eight years after the invasion—

HORN: The oldest, the oldest example of a tragedy that we have.

McLAUGHLIN: The oldest play we’ve got.

[17:32]

[VO]: We’re gonna talk a little bit about this extraordinary play, so I just want to set the table real quick. The Persians is the oldest play that survives from Ancient Greece, written by the earliest of big three tragedians, Aeschylus, who definitely served in the Battle of Marathon in 490 BCE—over 2500 years ago—during the first Persian invasion of Greece. As one index of the personal costs of war, his brother died in that battle. Ten years later, Aeschylus almost certainly participated in the Battle of Salamis, in Ellen’s words, “the nearly miraculous defeat, against seemingly impossible odds, of the Persian navy.” This battle provides the context for the play, produced eight years later, which is quite unusual because it’s so recent that many Greek men in the audience likely fought in it. As Ellen notes, tragedies usually dealt with topics like the Trojan War that were so old they had the feel of mythology even to ancient Greek theatergoers. The boldest move, however, was that Aeschylus set the play in the Persian capital, consistently asking his audience of Greek veterans to imagine the perspective and pain of their enemy. 

McLAUGHLIN: Everybody in that audience had experienced the sack of Athens and the unbelievable naval victory of the Battle of Salamis, in which the Athenians actually won against the greatest navy the world had ever seen. But everybody in that theater, whether there were women there or not, had experienced that. And yet they were being asked by Aeschylus to empathize with the Persians, who were their mortal enemies and who very nearly destroyed their civilization completely. They destroyed the city, but the people had been evacuated to the island of Salamis. And yet in the face of that extraordinary near miss, Aeschylus asked them to identify with, to have compassion for their enemy. And I still can’t quite believe the nature of the project of that play, what Aeschylus was doing! It is still just so outrageously unlikely that—you know, because it would’ve been such a cinch to write a triumphalist play about this extraordinary battle—it’s very dramatic, and which the Greeks won. And he does in fact describe that battle, which he was part of. I think we know that he actually experienced it. And it’s the only eyewitness account we have of any battle in the Persian wars, the Messenger’s account [in The Persians] of the naval battle. So it’s kind of extraordinary, because there is a way in which you can’t lie about that to the people who actually experienced it. They know what happened. So it keeps the playwright honest, and it means that the playwright has a real-world experience of the wars that they’re talking about. Whether they’re extrapolating their own experience as veterans and applying it to a myth like the Trojan War, which happens more often than not—or you’re actually talking about a contemporaneous event, which is very rare in tragedy …Of course, it’s commonplace in in comedy, but in tragedy you’re almost always talking about [the past]—you take those [present] experiences, and you create a step back for the audience. And for the playwright, you make a link with a mythical battle of some kind or a mythical story that everybody knows, but you infuse that with all of the blood and the temperature and the details of the wars that everybody has been experiencing. Because it was a time of constant war, and every single male citizen was necessarily conscripted to serve. You don’t get out of serving as a soldier in classical Athens.

HORN: It was your friend Oskar Eustis, now director of the Public Theater [in NYC] who first made this point to me about the relationship between drama and democracy, you know, the Western conceptions of which, starting at the same time … He and I in fact talked about it when we talked several years ago on this show. As soon as I realized what the Persians was, and why it was such a bold move, it was staggering to me as an example—that this is the oldest play, and look at this exercise of imagination that you’re asking people to do. But I think I hadn’t grappled fully with the idea that there’s, you know, a real civic purpose of it, of reintegrating. Whether this was the design or intent, certainly this had to be an effect, which would’ve been very different, because a triumphalist piece, you know, which would’ve been so easy to do—it would’ve been, you know, the Fox News candy of the time—but that would’ve kept people angry.

McLAUGHLIN: There’s a psychologist named Jonathan Shay, who has written extensively about the link between the veteran experience in ancient Greece and his studies of the kinds of therapy that he does with veterans in modern times. He worked for many years with Vietnam veterans, and now he’s working with all of the subsequent war veterans. He has found—and I think this is pretty commonplace at this point—that the most successful therapy to start with for veterans involved group therapy, where they sit around and they actually can talk to each other unguardedly, because they’re not having to translate for people who don’t understand what it was like. And there’s that intense bonding that veterans do with each other, that soldiers do with each other. One of the most important things, of course, is to get a patient to feel like he or she is safe. One of the ways to do that is to put them with people who understand what they’re grappling with. And so I think, on some level, that’s an aspect that has to have been an aspect of ancient Greek theater—because you’re sitting largely with other veterans and you’re watching the work of veterans. But on top of that, you’re watching stories that don’t sugarcoat or glamorize what war is and does to both victims and the victors. And that is, I think, at least as important, because you have to be in a safe space where you are. Your life at this point is not threatened. You’re watching other people, these characters, go through these horrific things, but you’re also in a situation where people are not lying to you. The actors aren’t lying to you. The playwright isn’t lying to you about what that experience really costs. And in that process of that, and igniting that crucial seed of civilization, which is empathy for others—for people who are, for instance, women. You know, watching The Trojan Women, the vast majority of the characters in The Trojan Women, Euripides’ great play, are women. And the women are treated the worst, of course, of all the people in any war situation. I mean, the Greeks were as bad as anybody else in terms of how they treated the women of the civilizations in the cities that they conquered. But to sit in a theater and watch the suffering inflicted on mythical women, knowing that that has a direct correlation with the women that you have been dealing with, suborning, it’s kind of an extraordinary thing! What that asks of a veteran, and how the project of the theater is working on veterans. But it did! And I think that if you can feel empathy for not only women who basically had no power, no voice, no presence in society as significant voices or forces—if you can feel empathy for that, and not only women, but enemy women. If you can feel something like empathy for those people, those characters, it allows you back into the circle of humanity.

DALY: It’s me, Ryan Daly again. Did you know that one of the first books that Ellen McLaughlin read by herself and to herself as a child was an illustrated book of Greek myths? The reason I know is that Pete was so fired up after recording his conversation with Ellen that he gave my young kids an illustrated book of Greek mythology as a gift two days later. Then he explained that I would need to record this ad for him in return. I’m kidding about that! The truth is that I make a monthly contribution to Point of Learning because I value the ideas this show prompts me to think about. [If you want, you can add a sentence here about the yoga episode or another one of your favorites ... or something specific you value about the show in general. Just for the love of God, don’t read aloud what I write in the brackets.] Click the link on the bottom of the show page to learn more about making a one-time donation or a small monthly contribution, like I do. The money helps with very practical expenses, like gas. Pete drove across New York State to visit Ellen and record their conversation in her home, which he does with guests whenever he can. The extra effort he puts into each episode helps make it something you can come back to and enjoy years later. All right, thanks for your consideration, and now back to the show!

[29:36]

HORN: Speaking of The Trojan Women, I mentioned that Russia’s war on Ukraine prompted me to pick up the book, but of course, war is always with us, particularly those of us in the United States. I read recently scholar David Vine’s assertion that since World War II ended in 1945, there have been only two years—1977 and 1979—when American forces weren’t invading, or fighting in some foreign country.

McLAUGHLIN: Really!

HORN: —which brings me to a remarkable project you undertook in the mid-1990s, while war was still raging in the former Yugoslavia, and involved female survivors of war, based on the Trojan Women. Could you share a little bit about what came to be known as the Balkan Theater Project?

[VO]: Before Ellen answers, I realize another note may be in order, especially for younger listeners, that the Bosnian War raged in the early 1990s and killed an estimated 100,000 people. Part of the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, it was then the most devastating conflict in Europe since World War II. The Trojan Women is a drama by Euripides from 415 BCE, an especially scathing indictment of the cruelties of war that treats the suffering of women, the wives and children of Troy’s defeated leaders, especially the Trojan queen Hecuba, her daughter Cassandra, and her daugher-in-law Andromache. (These names will come up in a minute, but there will be no quiz.) Anyway, in 1995, when over 2 million people had been displaced by the Bosnian War, Ellen received a grant from the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund.

McLAUGHLIN: … which was a very enlightened grant. I think it’s still going, where you get a certain amount of money for yourself, but you also get—I think it was $30,000 for three years. And with that money, you conceive a project in which you will work with an underserved community of your choosing and do some sort of hum human rights work as an artist. So as a playwright, I found that I was most concerned, most upset about what was going on in the Bosnian War in 1995. And I decided that what I would like to do would be to put together a reading of a new version of The Trojan Women that I would write specifically for this purpose. And I would multiple-cast it, so there’d be at least two people in every part: we had three Hecubas and three Cassandras and two Andromaches, that sort of thing. And I would multiple-cast it with a group of women who were from all sides of the conflict: so we had Bosnian Muslims, we had Serbs, we had Croatians, we had some Albanians even. And I spent a year working with the psychiatric social worker who had spent time in the former Yugoslavia during the war, and with the American Friends Service Committee, which is a Quaker organization that I’ve been involved with all of my life, since I went to a Quaker school. And we would recruit this wide, diverse group of people and spend two weeks, maybe three weeks putting together a performance of a reading. I wasn’t going to expect them to memorize the work—

HORN: I’m sorry, so these are like refugees in New York City or—

McLAUGHLIN: We were looking for people who had fled the war. And there’s a large population in Astoria, in Queens. So we did a lot of bar crawls in Astoria looking because there are the Serbian-patronized bars and the Croatian-patronized bars. And then we went to sewing circles for Bosnian Muslim women, because they weren’t going to bars. We were just sort of making inroads into the communities. We also put ads in various specific papers. There’s a Serbian New York communication and there’s a Croatian and, you know, so we were doing that sort of thing and meeting lots and lots of people. And we did this with the help of the American Friends Service Committee, which was great. And over the course of about eight months, we actually did put together a very diverse group of people, all of whom were refugees. So these were people who had just gotten to the country. They had experienced war. They had lost family members, most of them. They were trying to learn English, they were trying to find jobs, they were trying to educate their kids, they were trying to find housing. I mean, in every way, their lives were in this massive crisis, which is what it is to be a refugee. And yet, they still volunteered to come and our reading with somebody they’d never met of an ancient Greek play. And it was gonna take two or three weeks of their lives, every night. They were gonna have to come in from Queens to Classic Stage Company on 13th Street on the East Side of Manhattan. And they did it! And these were people who would have crossed the street to avoid each other in any other circumstance. But they were not only rehearsing together this crazy play that I’d written, but they were sharing parts with people. I mean, the three Hecubas the first year were all women who had lived in Sarajevo, amazingly enough—and within blocks of each other—but they had not known each other before. One was a Serb, one was a Croatian, and one was a Bosnian Muslim. The Andromaches: two women, one was a Serb and one was a wounded Bosnian Muslim who had been through the siege in Sarajevo. And it was all so unlikely and so extraordinary that they did this thing. I mean, I lost people because it was too hard sometimes. It was just hard to stay in the room with the dialect of the people that you considered your enemy. This remarkable young woman who had lost her entire family and was in this country all alone was being helped by a Quaker organization in an adjustment. She had lost all 11 members of her family, seen some killed in front of her. And I had her sit next to me through rehearsals because I was worried about her, obviously. And she shook through the entire thing. And we would, we had to take breaks every 20 or 25 minutes because people needed to smoke, so they had to leave the building in order to smoke. And I at that time was a smoker, so I would share a cigarette with her and I’d watch her shaking as she lit her cigarette. I said at one point, “You know, you don’t have to do this. You don’t have to. Feel no obligation to me, because this looks really hard.” And she says, “It is hard, but don’t worry about the shaking. That’s just the animal. The animal is scared. But when I’m in that room, I’m in my country before the war, because that’s what my country sounded like.” It was all these different dialects, all these different kinds of Yugoslavian. “And if I can do this, this will be good for me if I can stay in this.” And she was so brave and extraordinary that I cast her as Andromache opposite this Serbian woman who was the only woman in the whole group who had any experience as an actor and was remarkable in her own right. And what I had them do—all of the cast members—I had them translate their part themselves into their own language, however they defined it, and you know, some people called it “Bosnian” and some people called it “Croatian,” you know. But I had them all translate their part into that language. And some part, about half of it, they would speak in that language chorally and sometimes, and half of it, they would speak the words. The idea being that in an audience, if you only spoke English, you understood the play. If you only spoke Serbo-Croatian, you understood the play, because everything would be spoken at some point by somebody in your language. And I loved the sound of all that language. But towards the end of the process, I had the the groups of the various principal characters in different dressing rooms in Classic Stage Company. And at one point the Andromache dressing room just burst into a lot of yelling, and it was alarming. And I was standing outside the door with Sarilee Khan, who was this wonderful psychiatric social worker who helped me with the first iteration of this. And I said, “Should I go in? Should I break this up?” And she said, “Just let them do this for a while and maybe they’ll work it out. We’ll wait.” And finally the yelling subsided, and it was just weeping. And I went in and I said, “You know, I don’t need to know what happened here, but why don’t you leave the building, go get something to eat, take a break and, you know, come back when you’re ready.” And they left the building together and I thought, I’m never gonna see them again. Because that did happen: people walked away and never came back. But a couple of hours went by, and they came back and they were holding hands when they came back. And what had happened, which wasn’t surprising, was that they were working on their parts. And Svetlana [Jovanovic], the Serb had tried to help Elma [Balic], the Bosnian Muslim with the translation. And Elma had just said, “No, absolutely not. This is my translation.” I mean, that was part of the point that everybody could speak their own translation, that they owned their part to some extent, all of them. And she didn’t want some sort Serbian dialect coming into this thing. She wanted her own version of it. And then she just snapped and she said, “I can’t even sit in the same room with you, because your voice is the voice of the people who killed my family.” And Svetlana said, “I didn’t kill your family. The last time I was in Serbia, I was there to protest Milosevic. You’re gonna have to accept the fact that we’re not all the same Serbs.” And then they’d gone out together, they’d eaten together, and they came back together, and they worked beautifully together. And the night of the show—I realize that stage fright is a unifying force in civilization; if we could just get everybody at the UN to do plays together!—because it, it unified the entire cast. They were so terrified to go out on stage. And I came back to assure everybody it was gonna be fine. And I saw Svetlana, who was a very large person sitting on the floor cradling Elma and singing a Bosnian lullaby to her.

HORN: Oh my goodness!

McLAUGHLIN: And you know, after the play, which went well, I was smoking on the street with Elma, and Svetlana walked past and Elma offered her a cigarette, which is a big deal because, you know, the ritual is that if you accept the cigarette, then the two of you stand there and smoke and you relate to each other during the length of the smoking of the cigarette. That’s sort of the way it goes. And so there was a commitment to smoke together and the offering of the cigarette was a big deal, and to some extent it was done for me, which was, and so they spoke to each other in English and Elma said to Svetlana, “It was an honor to be on the stage with you. You are a great actor.” And again, who’d have seen that, coming?

[VO]: Ellen told another story about the actors assigned to the role of the Trojan Queen Hecuba getting into a tussle about what happened to their character after the end of the Trojan War. So this is real-life people having fled a real war in 1995, arguing about what happened to a mythological queen in a mythological war, because they were so wrapped up in their role.

McLAUGHLIN: “No, no, no! She fell—she threw herself into the ocean!” “No, she was killed on the beach.” And it’s like really great. I mean, I love the fact that [they were] arguing about this—but they argued about everything and there were but again—stage fright—they helped each other out, and they were bonded on stage by playing this character Hecuba. And they ended up sharing an apartment and raising their kids together and they know each other still.

HORN: You’re kidding!

McLAUGHLIN: It was, I think, the hardest thing I’ve ever done, because there was so much riding on it. I just I was so, so nervous about causing any damage because these were exceedingly vulnerable people who couldn’t—I’ve not met more vulnerable people in my life.  But they were also exceedingly brave people and profoundly generous people, all of them. And I’ll never forget it. It was one of the great experiences of my life.

[45:49]

HORN: Well, in terms of the relationship of the plays that you make, your versions, to the ancient originals. You don’t call them translations because you’re not—

McLAUGHLIN: I’m not a classicist.

HORN: —you readily admit you don’t know Greek, but even adaptations doesn’t seem quite right to you. So you settle on versions. And I should say that what you end up with in each case can vary considerably—

McLAUGHLIN: Considerably!

HORN: —in terms of the form of the plays. Like, I could see your Oedipus—I could see it, you know, staged in togas, with mountains ringing this stage. But your Helen, based on the Euripides play involves an upscale Victorian hotel room and a TV and a flyswatter, right?

McLAUGHLIN: Yeah.

HORN: So I wanna ask about your method, how you go about doing this, because you write that generally your process is you read all the translations that you can get your hands on, but then you put them all away when you start to write. But I just wonder, a little more about this please! Because dramatically certain things need to happen, depending on your project, depending on your aim. Like do you have a kind of sketch of the scenes, like: there’s a plague going on; Oedipus demonstrates deep compassion and expertise. …

McLAUGLIN: Each version has been commissioned, and that's crucial. I don’t do these off my own bat, or I haven’t in the past, and each theater’s needs are different. I’ve generally been commissioned and also been paired with a director in that commission. So each of the versions is really different from the other ones. And they’re all responses to particular requests, but they’re also responses to the times that they were written in. And also the plays draw from me very different responses. I find that when I look back on plays, like my version of Oedipus was written in relationship to—for instance, this was in 2004. (My dates are always off.) But I saw the Democratic National Convention, and I saw this speaker who I’d never heard of, this Barack Obama—

HORN: “With the funny-sounding name”!

McLAUGHLIN: —who came on and gave one of the great political speeches of our time. And I thought, That’s who I want as president!

Sen. BARACK OBAMA [2004 clip]: When we send our young men and women into harm’s way, we have a solemn obligation not to fudge the numbers or shade the truth about why they’re going, to care for their families while they’re gone, to tend to the soldiers upon their return. And to never ever go to war without enough troops to win the war, secure the peace and earn the respect of the world.

McLAUGHLIN: That quality of leadership and eloquence and just the sense that you want this man to lead your country or your city: that’s what Oedipus is. Oedipus is the great king, the great articulate hero, and wise hero of his people. And I spent a lot of time with Oedipus because I really had a hard time sort of figuring out the handle to pick him up. And it was Barack Obama’s speech that changed me, because I thought, Oh, okay, it’s a love story between the chorus and the king, and it’s about what happens when that goes wrong. But there is no doubt in my mind that he starts the play as the effective, compassionate leader who comes to his people who are in crisis and says, I am doing all I can possibly do. I just sent to Delphi. My heart bleeds for you. And he comes out to listen to his people at the very beginning of the play. And it is in the process of trying to solve the problem of the plague and solve the problem of the city’s suffering that the entirety of the tragedy plays itself out. But that can only happen when the force that impels the drama is the force of a man trying to do right by his city. And that’s what makes him tragic is that he saves the city twice: first by answering the riddle of the Sphinx, and secondly by exiling himself because he has identified the source of the plague, and he is it. And so he exiles himself from the city to save his city. And for me, the arcing force of that was about the nature of an extraordinary leader and the relationship of him to his people. So that was my way into that. But also my connection with that play had to do with the tsunami that killed such a terrible number of people in Asia. That happened in 2004. […] That sort of filtered into my experience of writing that play because I listened to right-wing evangelistic types talking about how the people who died were in fact being “punished by God.” I found that so hateful, but I also understood it as the attempt to make sense of the scale of the suffering that was involved and the scale of the disaster. And that it was spoken by people who were fearful and attempting to create some logic and also to understand a god who would stand by and let such a thing happen. Oftentimes, what interests me about the plays is the attempt to understand a god, the Greek gods. And one of the reasons that I’m attracted to the Greek plays and the Greek sensibility is that I’m basically a pagan too. I mean, the way that they talk about God makes sense to me. Because when you have a human natural tragedy like the tsunami, I think to attempt to turn that into some sort of vengeance of a god against a people or against nature is obscene. And the Greeks were quite clear about the fact that the gods were not so much a moral force as a force of fate in certain circumstances; and that appealing to the gods was inevitable—because that’s what we do—but more often than not, you would not get any kind of response that was coherent or understandable by humans, and that the gods, because they are eternal and profoundly not human, don’t fundamentally understand us or really have that much interest in us as humans. And that makes sense to me. So that entered into the way that I approached the Oedipus, which is, you know, there are appeals made to God throughout the Oedipus, by the chorus mostly, and there is never an answer. There are appeals made, an attempt to understand why should this be the fate of this great man? And you never get an answer on that. It’s just the way it is, which makes sense to me, because we’ve all known people who have not had the lives that they deserved, if there was a just god or a god that rewarded the deserving. We’ve all known people who have not had that kind of mercy. There is no sense of a merciful god, or a god who gives good people what they deserve and punishes bad people, because the suffering of the innocents is something that has been the question of religion ever since religion began.

[55:46]

HORN: I love the way that you write female characters—

McLAUGHLIN: Well thank you!

HORN: —such as Electra and the, in your words, “prickly and uncomfortable women that Sophocles surrounds her with.” I'll add, since we were talking about Annie yesterday, your depression era of version of Antigone, from your version of that play called Kissing the Floor, which is coming out soon to a bookstore near you in Volume 2 of The Greek Plays! It was a privilege hearing you talk about the struggle of making Annie edgy enough to embody what you saw as the core trait, or a very important trait, of the ancient Antigone. You’ve written beautifully about this, but may I ask about constructing or updating these women as a woman yourself, sometimes, as you put it, “forcing [you] up against [your] own demons”?

McLAUGHLIN. I think that as a feminist, when you approach the Greeks, you’re always approaching difficulty. All of these characters—these great, great female characters—are difficult in various ways. And I think that the unabashed embrace of that is a little bit like the way that I feel about the way that the Greeks write veterans: there are no obvious heroes. You know, the way that we toss around the word hero all the time now. The Greeks didn’t have a relationship to heroes the way that we do. The heroes of the Trojan War—except for Hector, and I think Patroklos you could make up case for as being, you know, extraordinary men of great integrity as well as being heroes—but virtually everybody else on either side is a problematic character in every way. The same goes for if you go to the Greeks to find powerful female characters who are the kinds of women you would want to model yourself after, for instance, you’re not going to find anybody! Because they are all deeply difficult women. And that’s part of what makes them heroic. It was the quality of the suffering of the hero that made the hero heroic. It’s the quality of the suffering of the female characters that makes them heroic; it’s what we do with what we’re up against as human beings. We are privileged as audience members to watch these characters have to grapple with impossible ethical situations, impossible struggles with their fate, with their relationship with their families, their relationship with the gods, their relationship with society. We are lucky enough to be able to sit in an audience and watch them deal with these things, and lucky enough not to be dealing with them directly ourselves—except to the extent that every human being is dealing with those things directly, which is why we’re watching the place to begin with. Because there is some level of recognition of watching these peoplehese characters cope with things that are outsized, but still recognizably human problems. So yeah, you take a character like Clytemnestra, the definition of a “problematic woman”—

[VO]: Clytemnestra, as you may recall, is the Greek queen who was the wife of Agamemnon and mother of Iphigenia, whom the warrior King Agamemnon sacrificed in exchange for favorable sailing winds at the start of the Trojan War. On the very day of Agamemnon’s return from the war, Clytemnestra stabs him to death in the bathtub.

McLAUGHLIN: —and I’ve written her twice now. She always takes over the play because the size of her personal imprint, the character’s reckoning with these truths that she lives with is so mesmerizing. We can’t look away from the way that she has decided her own version of justice and then lives with the consequences of that. No god is telling Clytemnestra to kill her husband! On the contrary, you know? But she has decided that that is the righteous action, that is the necessary action to even the scales after this horrendous, abhorrent crime of human sacrifice of her own daughter, by the child’s father. So, I mean, that makes her remarkable, just as the blinding by Oedipus makes him remarkable. And then she goes on in the plays after that—the play in which her son comes back from exile and kills her; she goes on to dominate that play, though she is technically the victim of that play. She is killed, but then goes on to actually dominate. Aeschylus [the playwright] is not done with her. In the third play of The Orestia, when she’s dead, she comes on and she does a monologue. I mean, he becomes so enamored of that character—the power of that character, and her ability to articulate a particular kind of human experience—that he brings her back after she’s dead in order to reactivate that voice and animate the drama. And I found her similarly—she is one of the great characters. But as a feminist, what do we make of such a character? You know, what do we make of a woman who’s murderous but also a queen? And no mistake, she was running the country before she got married to Agamemnon. He, after killing their child, he runs off to the Trojan War. She runs the country for 10 years while he’s gone. He comes back that day, she kills him. She continues to run the country for another perhaps 10 years before her son comes back. She is the ruler of that country. And you can take issue with how she’s running the country, but she is the queen of that country. She is the most powerful person on the stage, and she’s a leader. She sets up this signal system so that when the war is accomplished, she set up this signal where somebody on a mountain in Troy lights stack of wood and that signals the next person and the next person. The news of the victory of the Greeks travels across the known world because of the system that she sets up. That’s remarkable! I mean, she is a figure of great power, effectiveness, and intelligence. And she talks good too! I mean, so you’re faced with somebody like that and you find that, like every playwright who’s ever worked with these plays—and we are legion—she takes over the play, and is just too good a character to not want to do justice to her. Antigone: she dies for the gesture of covering her brother’s unburied body with dirt. It’s wiped off, she does it again. Does it work? She’s not convinced that it has worked. Did she just lose her life for a gesture that in fact didn’t work? She’s terrified at the end, as she’s about to go to her death, not of death, but of the dead! She thinks, Will they be happy to see me? Will he feel that I did enough? Did she do enough? I think she’s really in some doubt about that. And if she didn’t, what are we saying about that character? She dies for a gesture that may not have in fact even worked, because the Greeks never let you settle into an absolute certainty about anything. And I think that it’s absolutely crucial that there be that moment of doubt.

[1:05:12]

[VO]: Let’s let that sit: the value of doubt, whether about the means and ends of war, or about our most tightly gripped opinions. Thanks so much to Ellen McLaughlin for joining me. Her anti-war play Mercury’s Footpath, based on a tiny fragment of a Euripides text that has somehow survived for more than 2400 years, will be produced at Yale in November, if you’re in the New Haven neighborhood. Many thanks to her husband Rinde Eckert, the multiply-talented creator whose music punctuates the soundtrack for today’s episode. Thanks as always to Shayfer James for intro and outro music, and thanks to you for listening, rating, reviewing, and supporting Point of Learning. Ratings and reviews really do help other people learn about the show, so if you have a minute to click 5 stars or say something brilliant, thanks for your contribution. Point of Learning is researched, written, recorded, edited, mixed, and produced by me. I’m Peter Horn, and I’ll be back at you just as soon as I can with a new episode all about what and how and why we learn. See you then!

Baby, Unplugged Transcript (038)

DAVID EISENBERG: Hi, this is Dave Eisenberg, and you are at the Point of Learning with my friend Peter Horn. Today Pete will be talking with Sophie Brickman, author of the book Baby, Unplugged: One Mother's Search for Balance, Reason, and Sanity in the Digital Age. I've known Pete since he was my high school English teacher, and I've known Sophie since my last week in college, fifteen years ago. She and I are now married, living in New York City, and figuring out how to raise our three kids together. I resisted eavesdropping when Sophie and Pete recorded their conversation, but I have a feeling—call it fathers’ intuition—that it's going to be a great episode. Enjoy the show!

[00:55]

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today's show, Sophie Brickman, a journalist and mother of pre-school-age children who spent two years researching the intersection of parenting and technology. She's got some good news for you!

SOPHIE BRICKMAN: By and large, the way for kids to be optimally set up for life is to be bored and to play outside and to just be social and to be read to. That’s about it. It’s not more complicated than that.

[VO]: She has interviewed psychologists, neurologists, pediatricians, and children's book authors, among others—and makers of digital and analog toys:

SOPHIE: The simpler the toy, the better it is for them, because the more they do to the toy, the more imaginative they have to be, the more creative they have to be. All of that stuff is sort of taken away with many types of technology.

[VO]: She also confirmed that the killer app of the fifteenth century still deserves its acclaim!

SOPHIE: I spoke to one pediatrician who said, “If you asked me to go to the greatest minds in the world and make an object that could make kids smarter and more resilient and more social and better modern citizens of the world, they would come back with a book.” You cannot improve upon a book. … There is something that happens when you sit with a little kid in your lap and a book that has pictures where their neurons just go on fire.

[VO]: All that, and much, much more! Whether you're helping to raise young kids or not, you're gonna love this chat with Sophie Brickman.

[02:35]

[VO]: Hello and welcome to Season 6 of the Point of Learning podcast. Since 2017, I've sought through this passion project to bring you the best ideas I encounter about what and why and how we learn. Today I'm very excited to feature highlights from my interview with Sophie Brickman, because we delve for the first time in POL history into the topic of learning about raising very young children. New season, new turf! Sophie Brickman is a writer, reporter and editor based in New York City. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Saveur, The San Francisco Chronicle, and the anthologies Best Food Writing and Best American Science Writing, among other places.  Currently a columnist at The Guardian, Sophie wrote a monthly column for Elle interviewing influential women such as Nancy Pelosi and Joyce Carol Oates about their paths to success, served as Executive Editor of a travel publication launched jointly between Hearst and Airbnb, and was the Features Editor at Saveur. As a staff reporter at The San Francisco Chronicle, Sophie won first place in the 2011 Association of Food Journalists’ feature writing category for a piece about Napa’s French Laundry restaurant. I've got a link to that on the show page for this episode. Once upon a time, after attending the French Culinary Institute, she worked the line at Gramercy Tavern, making risotto and lamb ragù for the lunch crowd. Before that, she graduated with honors from Harvard, where she studied social theory and philosophy. Her first book, Baby, Unplugged, about the intersection of parenting and technology, which we'll be discussing today, was published by HarperOne in Fall 2021.

[04:20]

PETER: Sophie Brickman, welcome! We'll get to your wonderful book in just a minute, but first, I am bingeing The Bear on Hulu right now. Do you know that show?

SOPHIE: You wrote to me about it and I forgot to respond, but no, I have not. Now I need to binge it, I think!

PETER: It's, it's about a hand-carved sandwich shop in Chicago where they're trying a “French brigade” setup to reorganize the kitchen. It’s not important to get in those details. Super well-acted though, intense, but there are gorgeous shots of food and food prep. So I have been telling myself that it's cool to watch a couple half-hour episodes each night as I get ready for this interview with you, because you came to journalism first through your training—

SOPHIE: —through sandwiches, yes!

PETER: Well through like ragù, right? At the French Culinary Institute. You took a food-based path to get into writing. I think it's so interesting. Would you mind sketching that out briefly, just that sequence?

SOPHIE: Sure. So there was a very specific moment: I got a fellowship when I was in college to travel to Japan. I was spending the summer in Japan, and it was an absolutely eye-opening and amazing experience, but I was craving like mozzarella and pizza and pasta and all stuff that it was very hard for me to find where I was. I was in relatively rural Japan. And I was reading this book called Heat by a guy named Bill Buford who used to be the fiction editor of The New Yorker, I think. And he's a beautiful writer. The book was essentially about him discovering how much he loves food and then going to Italy and learning how to cook with Mario Batali. (This was years before [Batali] had all of this scandal around him.) And I was like, Is there a world in which I could write about food? That seems like such a dream. I don't know how I would ever do that. I graduated from college and I got a job at a nonprofit and I was making very little money. So I was living at home with my parents. And after sitting at an office job all day long, I would come home and change out of my H&M crappy business wear and cook at my parents' house. I kind of felt a need to use my hands or to, you know, see something from start to finish. I was a horrific cook, but I really enjoyed it. And because my parents are wonderful parents, they were like, Well, why don't you? If you want to go to culinary school, why don't you go to culinary school at night? Work during the day and go to school at night. And so I went to the French Culinary Institute, which I think has changed its name, but it's in Downtown Manhattan. So I would leave my office job at 5:00 and clock in at 5:45 and cook until 10:45, I believe, and then come home and do it all over again. It was three nights a week and it was brutal and I loved it. And so I sort of thought I was going to culinary school to learn to write about it. And then I ended up just working the line at a restaurant in New York City and really loving the comraderie of it, and the pressure, and the food. I learned a lot about food. Then I eventually ended up working as a food journalist at the food desk at The San Francisco Chronicle. But I found that the background of actually knowing how to chop things and move around in a professional kitchen made my reporting that much stronger. And actually, you know, chefs let me into their kitchen kind of because they didn't think I was gonna wildly screw anything up!

PETER: Well, I'm going to share on the show page for this episode a link to your award-winning piece on the world-famous California restaurant, The French Laundry, which was so vivid that I had to get up and make a cheeseboard, you know, to snack on while I read. But it leads me to ask, because you know how to do sophisticated things with food, as in prepare gourmet meals, but also with words, as in write and edit articles and features and now write a book, is there any apt comparison for you between those two kinds of creation? Or is it all contrast—is it all, you know, so very different?

SOPHIE: You know, I think the simplest similarity to draw between the two is that I went from working as a journalist and a newspaper to being an editor at a magazine and then working at an another magazine. And that feeling is very similar to me of everybody working for one goal and everybody has their own job to do, but you have to do it in sync. And at the end of the meal, everybody needs to feel like it was a cohesive meal. At the end of putting a magazine together, you need to feel like you've had everything start to finish and it sort of feels of the same piece, even though everybody's doing disparate parts. So I mean, I've never really thought about it in that way, but I think the drive and energy of a magazine close where you're up against deadline and everybody's staying up all night and going crazy is very energizing for me. It's a wildly different experience writing a book, I think, as any author will tell you, it's incredibly solitary. For most of it—even the book that I wrote, which involved a lot of reporting and stuff—it's like you're climbing a mountain by yourself for most of it, until you get to the editing phase and then it becomes very enjoyable and very communal but yes, I would say that working the line and working as an editor at a magazine, there are a lot of similarities there.

[09:35]

PETER: When you worked at Elle you wrote a monthly column interviewing influential women, such as sports commentator Jemele Hill, writer Joyce Carol Oates, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, public health expert Leana Wen, law professor Anita Hill, dancer Misty Copeland, and actor and NYS gubernatorial hopeful Cynthia Nixon. In all those interviews, what did you learn about how to establish the trust, or the rapport necessary to have the best possible conversation? I imagine it was a little bit different every time—or was it? How did you go about trying to have the best possible conversation? (Asking for a friend!)

SOPHIE: So first of all, I never was on staff at Elle. I was a contributor there. I respect the magazine a lot, and I think the fastest way to establish trust with someone is to do all of the reading you can about them, so that you're not asking them questions that they have answered a million times before, or so that you can pull something out from a long time ago and say, “When you were doing this role in 1984, blah, blah, blah …” It means that you have done your work. A lot of the people that I interviewed were very, very, very big names and had been interviewed a million times. And there's a fear as a reporter, that if you interview people who are incredibly well-spoken, a lot of their answers can be canned. You know, they've said the same version of an answer a million times, and it can get into a sort of call and response and what you want is a real conversation back and forth. And so I just over-prepared. I'm relatively not confident as an interviewer. And I got better doing that column, and I've gotten better as I continue to report, but I over-prepare. I remember, there's a director named Cary Fukunaga and he was kind of like coming up. I mean, he was probably relatively established back then, but it was not what he is now. And he was in San Francisco and I was sent to interview him because he directed Jane Eyre, one version of Jane Eyre that came out I don't know how many years ago [2011]. For preparation, I reread Jane Eyre, which was like wildly crazy. I should not have had to do that for a relatively short arts piece. And I watched a previous version of Jane Eyre that had been directed and compared them. It was too much. And I remember talking to my father. He was like, “What are you doing? This is like a thousand words, you're gonna be with him for 20 minutes?” But that's what I did. I think the more relaxed you can be in conversations, the better you are. I found that it calms me down to have read as much about these people as I can. So with Nancy Pelosi, she wrote an autobiography. I believe I read that. I try to read as much as I can beforehand.

PETER: Oddly enough, I did I read Jane Eyre to prepare for this interview.

SOPHIE: Oh, thank you!

PETER: But I found The Bear to be more fun!

[13:00]

PETER: I'm looking at the titles of some of your recent columns last year for The Guardian. Here's three of them: “If Covid’s ‘new normal’ makes you even more anxious than before, you’re not alone” [October 2021]; “Does overhearing your spouse’s work calls put you on edge? Me too. I found out why” [October 2021]; “After two daughters, I had my first son. The reaction was different—and revealing” [August 2021]. My question is, as with your book that we're about to talk about, Baby, Unplugged, there's a way that you situate yourself in your own story as a key element of the piece, sometimes. As a reader, I love that, but tell me about this choice.

SOPHIE: It brings up a million questions about what is and is not okay for somebody to write about: Is it okay for me to write about my kids before they're at an age to say that they want to be written about, or my husband, or whatever else. What I've found is that I write relatively humorously—or I try to—and I poke fun at myself and at my family in, I hope, not a bad way. And I find that as a reader, I enjoy human stories more than anything. So yes, I want the reporting and I want the headline and I want the data having been crunched and worked through by an author. But I find it easier to get into stories often, particularly about parenting and families, when it actually involves the first person. And there's beautiful stuff that is written that has nothing to do with the reporter, for sure, but the way that I figured out how to do Baby, Unplugged was to use my own experience as a jumping-off point for asking a bunch of questions about a given topic. And I found that my fears and concerns and questions were relatively universal for parents who were bringing up kids in a digital age. And so I felt it's comforting to read a story about somebody where you're like, Oh, she's in the same position. Okay, I'm not alone. I get it. And so that was my decision. I think that there are points on the spectrum. Nora Ephron famously said, “Everything is copy.” I think it was her, like grandmother or her mother was on her death bed and was like, “Use this!” It's like that's one end of it. On the other end of it is like, you cannot have a personality in your writing. And I think I'm somewhere in the middle. But for sure, I'm very careful about how I write about my family and my husband, who I write about a lot and is a character. He reads everything and gives it a stamp of approval. He's never once said no. I'm not, you know, using him in a particularly provocative way. But so I think my stuff is sort of a meld of memoir and reporting and research.

PETER: As I said, I really do enjoy it. I mean, it helps that I happen to know your husband, and so reading about him in this book, for example, I have to say, when you say you try to be humorous, I was not only chuckling, but like literally laughing out loud sometimes. And of course, from a story standpoint, he's an important foil.

SOPHIE: Absolutely.

PETER: Because he has this heavy tech bias, and you have kind of an anti-tech orientation, let's say, in terms of how you feel about it. He uses the tech. And you explain this in the book, and I've seen you talk about it in interviews as him kind of being an inspiration when you had a child, you being new parents trying to figure out what do we do with this little tiny human we’re responsible for, part of his impulse was like, Well, let’s get some tech and start measuring! And the questions began for you, like Where can it help? … So look at that! As promised, here we are talking about Baby, Unplugged, which I knew would make for a great conversation between us as soon as I learned that it would be published, which is about a year ago now (when I found out). I had the pleasure of getting to know your eldest child, Ella, who's now five, a little bit via Zoom during the first pandemic winter, so I've been persuaded for a while now that you and Dave are pretty amazing parents, and so your exploration—well, that kid didn't come outta nowhere!

SOPHIE: She's all herself. I don't know. We don't do anything, but thank you!

PETER: So like your exploration though, about how tech should be integrated into kids' lives where it could help, where it could hurt, as you note at the outset [of the book]. I knew that your that your account would be carefully researched and thoroughly informative. And I was right about that! But I also want to ask, because you are a person of many parts—a trained chef, a journalist, a writer, an editor, a wife, daughter, sister, a Great British Bake Off enthusiast, in addition to mother—how has it been, this experience of writing and talking about this book, which foregrounds your identity as a mother, vis-à-vis the other identities that you have?

[18:15]

SOPHIE: It’s a fascinating question, and one that I'm actually grappling with with the next Guardian column, which should be out shortly. I read a book called The Baby on the Fire Escape. It just came out in April, and it's about motherhood and creativity. And so the biographer [Julie Phillips] has about six or seven biographies of very important women writers and creators: Alice Neel, who’s a portrait artist, Ursula Le Guin, Susan Sontag, Doris Lessing, and a bunch of others. And her exploration, which took her 10 years to write, was sort of how did different women treat being a mother and being a professional, and in the Venn diagram of creativity and motherhood, where does it overlap and how does it overlap? And it's something that I basically read from start to finish, and then turned again and read it again with a pen and then called her and was like, “Can I interview you?” It changed my life, because it's very hard. I think my choice has been to integrate the two. So it's like, I used to be a journalist. And I wrote about what was interesting to me, which was food at the time. And then after five or six years of writing about Brussels sprouts and avocados, I was like, I can't do this anymore. I need to pivot somehow. And then I started writing about travel a little bit, and then I had Ella and—as has happened with many parents, but it certainly happened to me suddenly—my focus just zoomed in on this little person. And I was like, Wait, my role in the world has changed. And I don't really know anything about you. And I don't know anything about me in this role and I'm not sure what I'm doing. And the way that I kind of dug myself out of that anxiety and confusion was by reporting it and making it a subject of my journalistic background. And so the book was the result of that. I wrote a couple columns and realized that other people were also grappling with these questions. But in terms of my role as a mother versus what I write about, I've chosen to meld the two for now. We'll see how long I can keep this going. And then when I get bored of my kids, I'll pivot to something else—though I don't see that happening anytime soon!

[20:17]

PETER: Researching this book, you read other books, histories, studies, voraciously, but also interviewed experts from toymakers to app developers, to pediatricians, to specialists in child development. Sometimes it was a phone call, but many times you traveled, for example, to Rochester, New York, not far from where I'm sitting, to the Strong Museum of Play, which my wife Robyn and I had to borrow our niece and nephew to check out extensively, or as much as we wanted several years ago. We thought we were bringing them for undercover work, but we really just wanted to check out the Museum of Play! We didn't meet with the curators like you did. You also, for example, went to visit bestselling author Sandra Boynton at her home in Connecticut. For all the interviews you mentioned in the book, you distilled the essential information and set the scene such that I felt like I was right there with you, but I wanted to ask, is there one of these conversations that still stands out for you? I'm not asking you to play favorites, but was any just so surprising or rich, or the context of being in the place, if it was an in-person interview, that you still find yourself thinking about it from time to time?

SOPHIE: I think two of them stand out to me for sure, and for very different reasons. The first is—you mentioned Sandra Boynton. So like anybody who has a kid under the age of two probably has her board books. And I didn't really know them until I had kids, but now we have like bookshelves of them. And they're really funny and they're really charming. And they're for little, little, little kids. And this woman Sandra is incredibly prolific, so there are a bazillion of them and there's music and there's all this stuff. Being able to be in the space where she works— she has a barn that's connected to her house, that's like the next building over. She has a team of people that I think, you know, help promote stuff, but it's mostly just her sitting in this rural barn in Connecticut coming up with very funny and zany characters. She's incredibly warm and very welcoming. When I visited her, I happened to catch her the day after she had babysat for her newborn grandson. And so she was a little bleary-eyed and also kind of in the state of being around very, very little kids, the way that I feel like I have been constantly for the past six years. But she's very smart. I think there's sort of a misperception that writing children's books is sort of simple. It's like, Oh, it's just the simple thing that you do! It's incredibly hard both to capture their attention and also keep the parents involved. And she manages to do it in books that are like 10 pages long. And each page is like four sentences of four words on a page. They're very simple. They're funny. Her drawings are very charming. And so that was a wonderful interview to kind of see how amazing it is that she can do all this in her head in this barn by herself. I picked up little things when I was there. I think I mentioned this in the book, I don't remember, but she had, like, she opened up the fridge to get some milk and there was a Mickey Mouse pancake. And I was like, Of course you bake pancakes and they have ears on them! I don't know who that was for, but obviously that's your type of pancake! And then the other interview that I absolutely adored doing was Alison Gopnik. She's just a powerhouse in terms of her intellect, she's Adam Gopnik’s sister. She's a very, very lauded developmental psychologist and she runs a lab in Berkeley. So I went out there and interestingly, in terms of talking about how to get good interviews, towards the end of our interview, I thought it was the end. And I was like, This has been okay, but it hasn't been amazing. And then I actually don't remember, but something changed in our dynamic and I had put my notepad away, but I still had my voice recorder on. And we started talking about some other slightly tangential thing and then ended up talking for like another 45 minutes. And that was where the meat of the conversation came from. But she has written wonderful books about developmental psychology. She has an incredibly reasonable take about parenting. Her book The Gardener and the Carpenter I cite multiple times. The basic premise is that, you know, “parenting” as a verb is relatively new in our lexicon. You didn't [used to] parent; you raised kids. And the way that people think about parenting often is sort of like being a carpenter where you carve away and you make a perfect specimen by making the right choices. And what she says is if you treat it more like being a gardener where you have a plot of land and you give the plants, or your kids, as the metaphor goes, the environment in which to explore and grow in an optimal way, which means you give them some sunlight, you give them some water, you just let them be … it's kind of a different way of looking at the idea of parenting. And it sort of upends people's philosophies, particularly since she has shown in many ways that all of these minute decisions you think you're making that are gonna have an impact have no impact whatsoever! Once various basic needs are met, like whether or not you let the kid cry it out or sleep in your bed, or nurse or don’t nurse, or whatever, all these things that parents can tend to get very anxious about … there's no discernible difference, however many years out, which I took to be a very comforting notion. So those two, I think, for sure, but I mean, I loved all my interviews. I really did.

PETER: I wanted to ask about just one other one, because I was delighted to see Ellen Langer come up, the mindfulness expert, because she's somebody I've admired for a long time. Was there anything, I don't know, anything sparkly about that conversation? I think was a phone conversation, right?

SOPHIE: It was a phone call. I remember that conversation vividly because I got the book deal right before my second was born, like a month before she was born. I had this insane notion that I was gonna be writing and reporting through the entirety of her first year! I ended up finishing the book on time, but the first three months are just like, you're not sleeping and you're covered in spit-up, and you're completely delirious. And so she was probably two and a half months old and I was like, I'm gonna report, I'm gonna get all this stuff done. So I was like sleeping in one-hour chunks and I had Ella, who was at that point three years old. And I was like, I'm just gonna interview someone. I have to interview somebody about being mindful. And I'm anxious. And I feel crazy like, Who should I interview? And I typed in “important mindfulness” whatever, blah, blah, blah, and her name popped up. And I didn't know that much about her. And I quickly read her CV and was like, Oh, she's legit. And I emailed her and she wrote back and was like, “I'd love to talk,” at which point I was like, Okay, I'm gonna start researching about her. But in the course of that, I told Dave, who was a psychology major in college. He was like, “Oh my God, you're talking to Ellen Langer?” I was like, “Yeah.” He was like, “She said yes to an interview.” I was like, “Yes.” He was like, “She is a huge deal!” And so I started reading her stuff and then I fell in love with what she stands for. In the conversation she was very approachable. She doesn't have children of her own, but I think she has like step-kids and dogs and something else. She reminded me in certain ways of my mother. She's sort of like no bullshit, and very brassy and funny. So I was very grateful that she took this cold email from somebody who—I'm sure the email was just delirious. I don't even, I can't, I will cringe to read what I wrote, because I was literally operating on like one hour of sleep a night, but she was very gracious, even though I was probably a mess!

[VO]: Sophie's book provides a capsule  introduction to Ellen Langer's work on mindfulness and the mind-body connection, including Langer's research-based conviction that if the mind is fully in a healthy place, the body will be as well. According to Langer, part of mindfulness is the ability to think unconventionally and not just parrot back what you've been taught, or mindlessly trust what someone tells you. This ability helps keep us alive, aware, and happy. As Sophie writes, "It's a sense children are born with, that's rooted out after just a few years on earth. If we can emulate them, find the beauty in changing our underwear five times before breakfast, in slathering ourselves with sun lotion at night, we might just find ourselves feeling more grounded, more present" [page 60].

DAVE: It's me again, Dave. Because I show up periodically in Sophie's writing, Pete thought it would be fun for me to pop back into the show to do a Patreon ad. I'll let you be the judge of that, but the deal is that I'm not only a tech enthusiast, my day job now is as a venture capitalist, which means I spend all day thinking about worthwhile investments. But when Pete's podcast joined the Patreon platform two years ago, I didn't have to think about it at all. I immediately signed up, which you can too, by clicking the link on the show page. To be clear, I'm not talking about lots of money here. I kick in a few dollars each month because I believe in doing a little bit to help Pete spread great ideas about what and how and why we learn. You can join the many other listeners who have decided to do that too—giving 3 or 5 or 20 dollars a month—or actually, whatever amount you choose—or make a one-time donation. Click that link on the show page to learn more. If you care about lively ideas curated in an evergreen format that you can go back and enjoy again months and years later, this podcast is a good investment. Back to the show!

[29:50]

PETER: On another phone call, you spoke with the children's media historian Helle Strandgaard Jensen. You called her in Denmark, where she works at Aarhus University. I should back up and say that you wrote that “implicit in every conversation I'd had with experts”—and we're talking whether doctors, professors, content creators—there “was the notion that quality”—as in ‘quality content’—generally meant “educational” [page 209]—if Sesame Street produces quality content, it's because kids are walking away with some basic numeracy or literacy or something like that, some of these basic skills. But Jensen, the media historian and professor that you talked to in Denmark, she emphasizes like the value of giggling and silliness in young children's programming and not worrying that Scandinavian shows might not like prioritize reading skills so early.

SOPHIE: Yeah. I think that there is, particularly in America, and there are many reasons why this may be the case, but there's a lot of emphasis on getting your kids ahead early. The earlier the better. So there was, you know, Baby Einstein, which I think was debunked in court. There's Your Baby Can Read, similarly debunked. They were all fraudulent. It's the idea is that you can optimize every moment of your kid's life, starting at birth, or even in utero, and then the kids will, you know, get into an Ivy League school faster and be happier and more successful and whatever else, and kind of be at the head of the rat race. And actually [Alison] Gopnik, who we spoke about before, she had a very smart posit about why that is the case. She said, the rapid inequality gap that is getting bigger and bigger and bigger means that the middle class is winnowing and people are afraid that their kids are going to fall out of the middle class. And so there's this race to keep up. And like, Kids are born behind in various ways and how can we catch up? And so the result of that often is that when you come to technology, which is where my focus was, there are programs and apps and eBooks and stuff that are very “educational.” And I'm putting that in quotes because it's like, what does “educational” mean for a kid who's in preschool, who's under the age of five? And I talked to neurologists about actually what kids can learn from screens and what they should be doing. By and large, you know, the way for kids to be optimally set up for life is to be bored and to play outside and to just be social and to be read to. That’s about it. It’s not more complicated than that. The simpler the toy, the better it is for them, because the more they do to the toy, the more imaginative they have to be, the more creative they have to be. All of that stuff is sort of taken away with many types of technology. And when it comes to programs, there are valid reasons that Sesame Street can be wonderful, and also reasons where you're not exactly sure if it's the best thing for your kid to be watching. The idea that you can put your kid in front of Sesame Street and they are benefiting simply because they're learning a number or a letter is something that she took issue with because she said, “I like to watch television shows with my kid that I like to watch, so the two of us can sit down and laugh over something together.” That's a value that she thinks is important. And I don't know if you need research to back that up, but if you need the research, I did it! If you are co-engaging with your kid on anything, cooking something with them, playing with a toy with them, reading with them, watching television with them, playing an app with them—even though it's harder to play together—those are all moments where you're talking to them and interacting with them. And that's all good stuff, like really good stuff. So I think that in America, this focus on education and success is very, very narrow and very damaging because it teaches parents that they need to optimize these moments of childhood, when in fact what's best for the kid is really to kind of have free play. Helle told me that where she lives, her son isn't learning how to read until seven. That's just how it goes. You just wait until that age to sit down with your letters. And when you look at achievement-based, you know, how well kids are doing in school, for sure the Scandinavian kids are always off the chart compared to Americans. And so there's a question about what we should be cultivating. My takeaway from her was like, If you enjoy something and you want watch it with your kid, and it's not “educational,” go ahead and watch it with them! Make sure that it's not some horrible shoot-‘em-up film, but if you're watching with them, it can be really wonderful. And Ella for years loved the Muppets, various Muppets things, which are just silly and charming, but I don't know what educational value there is in watching like the “Mahnamahna” skit get over and over again. What she and I were learning was like, We both find this funny, and it's silly, and that's good too!

[35:25]

PETER: There's two major sections of the book. There's “Parentech,” where you address the tech that's marketed to parents, including devices, furnishing data on your newborn’s every sleeping moment and so forth. The second half of the book is “Babytech,” which deals with things like smart toys and interactive reading devices, more for the kids themselves. I wanted to pull just one of the topics from each half and ask you to riff on it a little bit. You've got a chapter in the “Parentech” half where you get into the question of “baby paparazzi.” The paparazzi, of course, in this case, are the parents who can't resist taking all the pictures they possibly can of their impossibly cute children. And you ask, If you're capturing the moment, are you ever in it? There's a tension between documenting the moment and being present to the moment, which has this other layer of complication with kids, because of course there are privacy concerns when it comes to sharing images of them online. So can you speak on some of the things that you considered as you sorted this out for yourself?

SOPHIE: Yes. You know, the idea that I'm now not gonna take my phone out and take a million photos of my son who's about to turn one is ridiculous. I have a billion photos that I'm never really gonna look at in any real way. But my question mostly was like, now that we have these little devices in our pockets all the time, what is it doing both to them to constantly be photographed—which kind of came up because, you know, Ella was able to look up and pose before she could tie her shoes. They know constantly that they're being filmed in some way, which is kind of dystopian and weird, and I wanted to investigate what that meant for the kids. And then also what it meant for us to be constantly documenting it. And I wanted to take a second and muse on why I felt the need to be documenting all of these things. Like what if I didn't catch her first step? That's okay! And so the reporting led me to speak to a bunch of different people, including a guy named John Palfrey, who was an internet law expert and the head of the MacArthur Foundation and the head of, I think, Andover for a while, fascinating guy. He's just great. And he wrote a book called Born Digital, which addresses this in part, what happens with privacy concerns and like, My kids are too little to know and There are a lot of people on Instagram who are putting photos of their kids up there, and that's a part of their brand. And what are the implications of that? I don’t know if I talked about this with John, but there are questions of what the future holds in terms of economic inequality, where people will be able to pay for their privacy. So you'll be able to pay and say, “I don't want any photos of my children on the internet,” for example. And if you can't pay then, like, that's just how it goes. So it's a scary notion of what can happen if you're posting photos of your kids left and right, which a lot of people do. But I think for me, the most interesting question to delve into was why I felt the need to capture it. And if, you know, just letting the kids' lives unfold, where I'm occasionally catching a photo could do the same thing and make me happier and calmer in the moment, which was the case. So now I try to keep my phone away as much as I can. I mean, like all of us, and then I fail, but I try!

[39:04]

PETER: You had a nice example of your mom's approach. She was very selective and curated some albums when you were growing up. And so you were documented, but it didn't feel like it was just endless pictures all the time. And I think she also made the choice not to have you pose? Or not have you smile …

SOPHIE: Right. I mean, they were very kind of like stark black and white, kind of more like Sally Mann, who takes photos of her kids where they're like running around naked in the woods. That was like closer to what my family photos were like. We never posed in front of monuments or anything, but you're reminding me, there was a part of that too about the difference between art and documenting … the amount of photos that I take versus the photos that I print out and will put on the wall. It's crazy. I have thousands and thousands and thousands of photos where I just—I take them mindlessly. And my mother who was taking photos on a Leica camera and developing them herself, you know, she had to be very particular about what she took photos of. And then she went through on these contact sheets with a red wax pencil and decided which ones she wanted to print out and got them printed and put them in the albums. It's a thing that we don't do, this generation doesn't do, I think a little bit to our collective detriment. But I mean, I don't have time to make a photo album. I’m just not gonna do it. But you know, maybe sometime in the future, I will get out my wax pencil.

[40:47]

PETER: When we were talking last month, just kind of spit-balling about what we might discuss today, I hadn't yet gotten to the chapter—it's actually your last chapter, where you focus on reading and reading-related tech, but you predicted I'd find it interesting, and how right you were! Reading is so much more complex a task than we generally consider. So for example, I didn't do it every year as a high school English teacher, but a couple of times just to drive this point home for students and to make it strange again, I would present juniors or seniors with small examples of different kinds of texts, like a cookbook, like a recipe, right? Like a single panel cartoon, like a snippet of dramatic writing, like a page of a scene from a play, a short poem, a news article, a map. And I would ask the kids to think and write and talk about what is actually involved in reading each of those. I mean, those are very different kind of texts, but “reading” is the name that we give that process that we apply to making sense of them. In each case, we're doing something different, but it's all called reading. I think I do want to go ahead and spoil that your research led you to conclude that old-fashioned books, at least for the time being, still have an edge over apps and tablets, if you have the choice, that is, if you have books around.

SOPHIE: For sure. I asked the same question to many of the people I interviewed at the end of my interviews, which was “What is the single best piece of tech that you've seen for children?” Depending on who I spoke to, I got wildly different answers from people in Silicon Valley to neurologists, whatever. But I spoke to one pediatrician who said, “You know, if you asked me to go to the greatest minds in the world and make an object that could make kids smarter and more resilient and more social and better modern citizens of the world, they would come back with a book.” You cannot improve upon a book, and it's really the best thing for young kids. That was something that was iterated over and over again in different interviews that I had. There is something that happens when you sit with a little kid in your lap and a book that has pictures where their neurons just go on fire. And they make connections and their synapses fire in some amazing way. And when you get into the nitty-gritty of the neurology, which I did, it's really amazing what has to happen to put strings of letters in to form sounds that then you can sound out and say out loud. Ella can now read, but the last year when she was learning how to read, it's amazing how she does it and how she can recognize certain words and how she can sound things out and how it just suddenly it's like rolling down a hill, it just goes faster and faster and faster. And you can see the connections being made. That doesn't happen on a tablet when lots of other things are going on. And for sure there are ways to dumb down tablets so it's as close to a book as possible, so there aren't animations, which are kind of too “hot” for kids. But the perfect medium for enjoying something and teaching kids about how important words are, and teaching them like lessons about how the world works? It's all in a picture book. There was a study that was done that they ended up calling it shorthand the “Goldilocks Study.” They put little kids, like preschoolers, through MRIs to see what was going on when they heard a story just orally, so they just heard it—they couldn't see anything; when they were shown an animation of the story; and when they were read a picture book. The animation was too “hot,” like their neurons were kind of like firing in a crazy way. They couldn't exactly focus on the words. The aural story at the young ages was too “cold”; they needed a visual to say like, Okay, that's what a rabbit looks like. That's what a little mole rat looks like, or whatever the case is. And that picture book was just right for them. Neurologically, things were firing in the right way. The guy who said the most important piece of technology is a book also said to me, Yeah, you can go to neurology and you can go deep into the science for this, but you can also just look at a kid who's engaged with a book and you can see that they're happy and you can see that they're calm and not jangled. And if you take the book away, they don't have a panic attack. They move to the next thing. Try doing that with an iPad where they've just been playing a game, it's like World War III! So I think, you know, just intuitively, there is something wonderful about a book too.

[45:38]

PETER: The subtitle of your book is “One Mother's Search for Balance, Reason, and Sanity in the Digital Age.” You touch on these things throughout, but I love the way that your conclusion kind of brings things together, because there's this through-line, of course, of parental anxiety. You feature your own worries and questions throughout. You're very honest and candid about them. And I would have to think that, you know, other people's anxiety about “Babytech” or “Parentech” is a major reason that most readers would gravitate toward your book. For this reason, I love this arc that that comes to completion in the conclusion where you talk about balance and sanity, granting yourself permission to feel sometimes that you're getting it wrong as a parent, which doesn't mean you are, of course! But for instance, you note that at least five of the experts that you interviewed said in various ways that between parents and children, friction is not only part of the process of parenting, but in fact, important and beneficial to both parties. Could I ask you to read the next few sentences there?

SOPHIE: Sure. “Embrace the middle-of-the-night wake-ups, the tantrums, the fourteen minutes it takes to choose a sock, and you'll become the kind of parent who really knows your child, who can help prepare her to thrive in a brave new technology-fueled world we are only beginning to understand. While I thought I'd been writing about how to navigate the technology-bombarded world of parenting, in fact, I'd been exploring what it means to be a parent and how to raise a human I actually want to hang out with. Friction and discomfort are all part of that process” [pp. 292-93].

PETER: I'll note that page 293, where you stopped reading, may be my favorite single page of the book, because you also declare that if you're gonna help your children actively learn and grow, and I quote, “I, the parent, also have to actively learn and actively grow” (p. 293). This is just so critical for any kind of teacher. I think this acknowledgement that If I'm going to do this, if I'm gonna take on this role of presuming to help somebody else develop, I better make sure that I'm developing, myself, and that I'm growing. And of course it would be the most natural thing not to focus on that part as a parent, but I love that you meditate on it at the end. Is there anything else that you might add along those lines? Any updates or insights or greater patience for yourself?

SOPHIE: Yeah, I mean, I think it's easier to write it than it is to internalize it. And particularly with a third kid, I sort of joke, Well, I wrote the book before the third kid. Now everybody's plugged in all the time because that's how I can function! But that's not really the case. I think that it's helpful to know that everything is a phase in parenting. And just when you think They won't be able to play alone on their own, they learn how to do it. I think a lot of it is cutting yourself some slack, and picking one or two people to ask questions to and not taking in so much information. There's so much information out there about what you should do and there's so much judgment about what you might be doing wrong. I think that certainly with three [children], you start to internalize that friction and discomfort are all part of the process. You just have to embrace the chaos a little bit and it can become very enjoyable. You know, I handed the manuscript in the week, I think, when Cuomo shut down New York because of COVID. And so it was like everybody's worlds got completely upheaved. And our reliance on technology completely changed and how we viewed technology became much more of a necessity. And we were stuck in a little apartment with two little kids and not really allowed to go outside. And so it really put these conclusions I came to to the test of how to be as graceful as possible as you navigate becoming a parent and raising little kids. And I think just knowing that you know your kid pretty well, and that it's okay if you feel overwhelmed and you're not exactly sure if you're doing the right thing. Everybody else feels like that. And if they say that they aren't, they're lying, I think. That's what I tell myself!

[49:55]

[VO]: That's it for today's show! Thanks so much to Sophie Brickman for joining me. You can learn more about her and find more of her work at sophiebrickman.com. Her book Baby, Unplugged is available at your favorite bookseller. Today's episode features an instrumental version of "Crack a Bottle, Run a Bath" by Shayfer James, with fiddle parts by yours truly. Shayfer has also graciously allowed me to use versions of his songs "Weight of the World" and "Villainous Thing" as intro and outro music for going on six seasons now, and he's about to tour yet again! Show dates and more at shayferjames.com. Finally, thanks to you for listening and supporting this podcast in whatever way you can. If you know a new parent targeted by ads about Babytech, please go ahead and share this episode with them. It will mean most coming from you. Point of Learning is written, recorded, edited, and mixed by me. I'm Peter Horn, and I'll be back at you in just about a month with a new episode featuring award-winning actor and playwright Ellen McLaughlin. See you then!

Twelve Steps to Religionless Spirituality Transcript (037)

DAVID LUNDY: Hello. I’m David Lundy, and you are at the Point of Learning with my friend and sometime scene partner Peter Horn. I’m an actor who performed with Pete in The Woman in Black at the Kavinoky Theatre in Buffalo last fall. I’m also a recovering alcoholic who has family roots in the Anglican church, so I’m very interested to hear Pete’s conversation with the Very Rev. Ward Ewing, whose new book is Twelve Steps to Religionless Spirituality: The Power of Spirituality with or without God, which explores Father Ewing's 40+ years of experience with A.A. groups as a non-alcoholic, and how everyone can benefit from rigorous honesty in supportive communities. Enjoy the show!

[01:01]

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today’s show, the Very Rev. Ward B. Ewing.

WARD EWING Everybody has spirituality. Spirituality is not unrelated to belief in God, but it's not primarily about belief in God. It's how we perceive, how we respond, and the choices we make.

[VO]: What anyone and everyone can learn from the kind of community formed in Alcoholics Anonymous groups …

WARD: One of the things I like about A.A. is they are very clear: We are not striving for perfection, but for spiritual progress. Part of my objection to the church is it implies that we should be perfect, and that's a dangerous place to be because the only way I can be perfect is for me to believe I'm perfect and deny everything else!

[VO]: His new book offers a radical challenge.

WARD: What I think this book proposes is a deep challenge to our culture, which is focused on success, on money, on individual popularity, on individual achievement. And what I'm looking for is some sense of humility, and love and tolerance for others, and openness to ideas that are different. And it ain't gonna happen in a day!

[VO]: All that, and much more coming right up! Stick around!

[02:27]

[VO]: Ward B. Ewing is “the reverend” because he’s an ordained Episcopal priest, and “very reverend” because he is the former Dean and President of The General Theological Seminary in New York City. Before that role, he served as the Rector, or senior pastor, of the Episcopal church I attended with my mom when I was in high school, Trinity Church in Buffalo. During his time at Trinity, the average weekly attendance grew from under 50 to more than 300 people, with a rich offering of Sunday school, youth, and adult education classes, as well as an innovative small group program that many participants called “life-changing.” I had great experiences in Sunday School and youth group at Trinity, but I also appreciated that Ward welcomed high-schoolers like me to serve on committees and have a say in what went on with the church’s mission and outreach. A thoughtful leader, a compelling preacher, and an enlightened teacher, Ward had a deep influence on me as a teenager. I vividly recall his honest reflections on challenges we all face sometimes as he taught a diocesan youth retreat class one summer. His example of honoring young people with real respect was a model for me when I became a  teacher. Father Ewing had come to Buffalo from Louisville, Kentucky, where he and his family helped grow a small, struggling mission into a thriving congregation with a new building. As he will relate at the start of our conversation, it was in Kentucky that Ward began his more than four-decade association with Alcoholics Anonymous as a non-alcoholic, which later included his service as Trustee and Chair of the General Service Board of Alcoholics Anonymous for the U.S. and Canada. In addition to the book that grows out of that experience, which we’ll be discussing today, Ward has also written one volume each on the Book of Job and the Book of Revelation. Though he works as a consultant for churches and other organizations, and still preaches occasionally, he is now mostly retired with his wife Jenny in Ten Mile, Tennessee, which is where I connected with him via Zoom in early March 2022.

[04:58]

PETER: The book you published last fall is called Twelve Steps to Religionless Spirituality, subtitled The Power of Spirituality with or without God, and I'd like to start with that title, because you are an unexpected messenger for two of the big ideas implied there. First, "Twelve Steps" refers to the original twelve-step program, Alcoholics Anonymous, or A.A., which you have credited with welcoming and supporting you by its culture of "honesty, spiritual growth, and gratitude" [p. 143]. You've been meeting with and in A.A. groups of different kinds in different parts of the U.S. for over 40 years—but you are not an alcoholic or a recovering alcoholic. How did this come to be?

WARD: I'm a parish priest. I moved to Louisville, Kentucky in 1975. And one of the first calls I got was from a parishioner, the wife who said to me, she said, “Ward, I want you to go call on my husband. He got paid last night.” This is Saturday morning. “He got paid last night, went to a bar, spent his whole paycheck, got into a fight. He's in jail. I want you to go tell him I don't want anything to do with him. You need to visit him.” Well, I had no idea what to do! I mean, absolutely no idea—except to go get in the car and drive down to the county jail. And I talked with him and then he was released, and I don't think anything came of it legally, but I realized I didn't know why anyone would get paid, go spend his entire check in a bar and then get in a fight. That just didn't make any sense. So I said, I need to learn. And I thought the best place to learn was by attending open A.A. meetings. Back in those days, they were pretty smoky.

PETER: Right, right, right, right!

WARD: And I would come home from a meeting and Jenny would say, “Take your clothes off and leave ‘em outside! You stink!” So I’d been doing that about five years when Willie walked into my office. Willie was a member of the parish and a member of A.A. He had seven years of sobriety. And he said, “Ward, you’re the spiritual expert, right?” (I don’t think I answered that!) But he went on and he said, “I’m out of touch with God. The last time I was out of touch with my higher power, I drank. And if I drink again, I may die. I need you to put me back in touch with God.” And I had at least good enough sense to know that was not something I could do. And so we talked right then, and then we talked later, and decided to put together a group— turned out to be all men who had at least five years of sobriety who wanted to talk about spiritual issues in their life, and I was to be a part of that. There were about five or six of us—I think at one point, seven—who met every Tuesday afternoon. And that group is where I learned how to work the [Twelve] Steps [of A.A.]. And that became my primary spiritual program. And that group really changed my life. So that's five years with that group. And then I moved to Buffalo, continued being involved with A.A. in a variety of different ways, and then to [The General Theological] Seminary—same. And that was where someone asked me if I would be willing to serve as a Trustee. And the General Service Office, which is the head of A.A., is in New York. And I became a Trustee and then ultimately Chair of the Board.

PETER: I read the book and found it thoroughly compelling, but you were framing it right there as you were getting involved as an exercise in learning, like—

WARD: Absolutely!

PETER: You recognized, Here's something I do not know about. I need to learn about it. How can I learn about it? This is the way, or this is a great way …

WARD: I mean, I also took a course at the University of Louisville. I attended seminars that the University of Louisville was presenting that were helpful, but those were all in the head. A.A. is not a “head” organization. It's a “heart” organization. And I think that involvement was—I think that was a good way for me, anyway—to begin to learn. But yes, absolutely. My whole involvement in A.A. comes out of my ignorance!

PETER: Another unexpected element, again, for a book by Ward Ewing, an Episcopal priest—and you happen to be one who is the former Dean and President of a theological seminary—is that you’re writing about “the power of spirituality with or without God.” And so I wonder if it would be helpful to begin with what you mean by spirituality, which is to say: I was struck immediately by the expansiveness of “spirituality” as you define it in the opening pages. You say that, for example, when we become defensive because of criticism, that's a spiritual event. Or when we hold on to resentment. So the way that you’re considering it, spiritual realities include sunshine, the diagnosis of a serious illness, a good or bad evaluation by our boss—or at least maybe it’s our perception of those things and how we react to those things that makes them spiritual events …

[10:42]

WARD: Right. I define spirituality by looking at three different actions that human beings make. One is we perceive things. Now that's a very subjective thing to do! So we get a bad evaluation from a boss. How we perceive that is going be affect us spiritually. Another is how we feel about the world: how we feel about our boss, in this situation. If we like the boss and we got a bad evaluation, that's gonna be both upsetting and more likely to bring change. If we don't like the boss and we got a bad evaluation, we can just say, That's that guy. That's not anything about me. I am not gonna pay any attention to that. So then out of perception and feelings come choices, and all of these interact with each other. In other words, the choice that I make then to go look for another job is—I'm not gonna grow spiritually. The choices I make to change in my habits and try to figure out what I can do better, in fact, lead to a more mature spirit within me. How we feel about things evolves out of our perceptions and our choices. So these three things get intertwined in a pattern, and this is how we do things. So, for example, the simplest pattern, and maybe the place I began [in the book], is the active alcoholic who's drinking and believes he is not alcoholic and twists all of his perceptions to blame other people, to deny … I love the one about the guy who complained that when he got his third DWI, it was because the policeman happened to be on that road that night—not because he was drunk and driving, you know, and it's just really remarkable what an active alcoholic is able to do in his perception! And then there's a great tendency to lie and resent and then ultimately to be depressed and isolated, but all of that relates to his choices, his perceptions, and then his feelings that the world is a hostile place. It's a downward spiral that each of those factors play a part in. One of my favorite phrases that's not original with me, but is Spirituality is like health. Everybody has some. You have good health, you have bad health, you have poor health, you have excellent health. You have a mature spirituality, a healthful spirituality. You can have a destructive spirituality. I mean, look at what's going on in this world today in Ukraine. I mean, that has a spiritual base, in that Putin had a goal that he wanted and he's after. He's made decisions based on a perception that seems very skewed, as best we can understand. And it's a very unhealthy spirituality. Everybody has spirituality. Spirituality is not unrelated to belief in God, but it's not primarily about belief in God. It's how we perceive, how we respond, and the choices we make that form a person's spirituality. A pattern develops that forms a person's spirituality.

PETER: This is the last part of the title I'll ask about, and then we can move into some other things! But, “the power of spirituality with or without God.” Part of what drew me to your preaching in high school, when you were rector, which is to say senior pastor, of Trinity Church in Buffalo, is that you were quite thoughtful about the challenges of faith. You were not at all dogmatic. I remember you preaching once that that doubt is an essential part of faith, not the enemy of faith, for instance.

WARD: Right.

PETER: But with this book, I imagine some people have to wonder how this priest came up with what seems to be ambivalent subtitle, you know, “with or without God” …

WARD: Right. I've done a lot of work with atheists and agnostics in A.A., and they've taught me a lot. And what I've learned and what I've seen and observed is that they have pretty much the same spiritual path that the folks who believe in God—and you hear a lot of talk about God in A.A.—but that the people who believe in God have a very similar path, and what we have learned to do is to talk about experience first and recognize that God is an explanation. But there can be other explanations, and there's still a spirituality there that is transforming people's lives. It's a bit of a controversy within A.A. There are those who feel like you've got to have a belief in a traditional sort of God. I'm in that school that says we really don't understand God. And one of my favorite stories is from the Rector before me at Trinity Church …

[VO]: At one point in the book, Ward quotes his predecessor at Trinity Church, Tom Heath, who had a summer cabin on Cape Cod, and used it as an analogy for knowing God—or rather, not knowing God. Father Heath said, “I know the cape where my cabin is located. I know the tidal pools where can find specimens at low tide. I know how the weather can roll in when a nor’easter is approaching. I know the best time of day to fish and the changes the seasons bring. I know where I can swim and where the bottom is too rough or the waves too dangerous. But I cannot say that I know the Atlantic Ocean or all the oceans in the world. My knowledge ends a few hundred yards from my cabin. Such is my knowledge of God. I know something of God from my experience, but to say I have full or complete knowledge about God is as foolish as saying I know the oceans of the world because of my experience on Cape Cod” [p. 43].

WARD: He understands his little niche of Cape Cod, but he does not mean he understands the oceans and all of the waters. And I think our understanding of God is really an experience that we have had some sign of experience about God that's changed our lives. Folks who are atheists and agnostics have had an experience of gaining hope, of moving toward a more rigorous honesty, of the power of a community to change lives. But what we have in common above all else is to recognize that we cannot heal ourselves, that we need help. So whether you have a belief in God and look to God for that help, or whether you don't have a belief in God but recognize that if I'm a part of this group, I will change my life and it will change me—we are on the same path. So there's real spiritual progress. And belief in God helps some people and provides an explanation for some people. It does for me. But it is just an explanation. And experience is what's most important, not the explanation. And I have an awful lot of people who tell me about their belief in God, in a God that I could never believe in.

[18:27]

PETER: You have connected your experience with A.A. and outside of A.A. with learning what you call “the importance of knowing that you do not know.”

WARD: Right.

PETER: What do you mean by this?

WARD: Well, I started going to A.A., got involved in A.A. because I didn't know anything about alcoholism or about recovery. And I knew I didn't know! I do a lot of work trying educate clergy about alcoholism and recovery, and the role that the church can play. That's not a pretty picture! And they do not seem to care that they don't know. And the hardest thing to do is to get people to say, I need to learn something about this because it matters in my congregation. It makes a difference to a vast number of my parishioners. But if you don't know that, you go along and say, Well, I'll just be helpful, which is usually the wrong thing to do.

PETER: One of the things you write later on in the book, when you're talking about what you see as more helpful moves that the church could make—so you're writing about church folk speaking as yourself, somebody inside a church context—saying “we need to look clearly at the damage done by our presumption that we know the truth and that those who are not with us are less than healthy” [p. 177].

WARD: Right.

PETER: Which is what I think a lot of people, especially people outside the church who have a view of what people in the institutional church are about is that they take this kind of moralistic, dogmatic stance that says just that.

WARD: Too many churches play into that! And of course, I'm in Tennessee now, in not the heart of the Bible Belt, but certainly on the edges. When I hear these preachers get up and declare that they have the truth and if you don't believe as they believe you're going to hell, I just want to say, “Oh my goodness gracious, can't you open your eyes?” Archbishop Desmond Tutu was a friend of General Seminary, and was often there. And it was wonderful to get to know him a bit. As he said, “So Dalai Lama gets to heaven at the gate and Peter says, ‘But you didn't believe in Jesus. You can't come in!’ He says, ‘Are you kidding me?’” So, you know, we get that. And I think right now it's the most damaging thing that's happened to Christianity in our country. I'm also in the town—the church where I go is in Athens, Tennessee, which recently made national news for banning the graphic novel—

PETER: Oh, Maus! Art Spiegelman …

WARD: Yes, Maus. Our church—I’m so proud of us. Our rector said, “Let's have an open hearing on this. Let's talk about it. Let's not just ban books because some people think they're terrible,” and had a couple of hundred people, I think, turned up and was very careful to be sure and include the Jewish community. But that's one voice out of all the churches in Athens, Tennessee.

PETER: Wow.

WARD: And I think that's sad. I think the churches should have been out there, but they don't often do what I think they ought to do!

PETER: I used to teach that book.

WARD: Oh, did you?

PETER: As an English teacher. Oh yeah. Two volumes of it. And you know, kids really enjoyed it. Because of course, their first thought—because many kids were familiar with graphic novels, especially in later years, because they've been fairly popular for a while now. And certainly kids were, you know, familiar with comic books. So they thought like, “Hey, I'm gonna be [reading a comic book]!” And then they looked at it and they like, “Wow. So this is a different way to get this very hard story.” But what a way to tell it, and for this person whose art form it was, Art Spiegelman you know, being a [graphic] artist, but then telling his family's story.

WARD: Yeah, an important book, and actually now a best seller, thanks to the education board of Athens, Tennessee!

PETER: I noticed it on my brother's coffee table when I was at his house last week. I think he was making a point!

WARD: Yeah, not a good strategy if you really didn't want it read! But to get back to my concerns in the book, when churches decide they know what's right and try to impose that on others, they've sort of lost the center of the gospel, which has to do with humility—we probably don't know exactly what's right, and others have opinions that are really important— and love, which is to support a kind of dialogue. But in our polarized world, we've just lost all that, and the churches are as bad as everybody else. I think it's the most dangerous thing that's happening to the Christian faith right now. And it certainly is not in any way changing the trend, which has been going on for some time, which is fewer and fewer people are active in churches.

[24:08]

PETER: I've long been a fan of the Talmudic wisdom that we see the world not as it is, but as we are. Now don't get me wrong: like most people, I tend to act on a daily basis as though I perceive the world objectively, but when I slow down and challenge myself—or respond to the challenges of friends, loved ones, and colleagues—I recognize that my biases very much influence what I perceive as "the facts" or "the truth" of any given situation.

WARD: Right.

PETER: Because a certain amount of your book has to do with the value of rigorous honesty in A.A., I wanted to ask how do the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and the culture and community of A.A., in your experience, help A.A. members begin to discern the truth?

WARD: Well, I think as we've already said, knowing that you don't know as a first step is important. And that's what the first Step of the Twelve is: admitting that we are powerless over alcohol and that our lives have become unmanageable. In other words, realize we have a problem! Until you take that step—and I think that's the hardest Step for people to take. And it's the hardest step for the rest of us to take, which is to say, I'm not really perceiving the world as it is. I need to find another way. But until you take that step, then the arrogance and self-focus that we have will just rule. So the first step toward honesty is to recognize we have a problem. And then it's actually in the text of the book, Alcoholics Anonymous—it's usually referred to as “the Big Book,” because it is kind of big—that it speaks of those who are unable to be honest with themselves as those that are unable to follow this program and find sobriety. So that's where the phrase “rigorous honesty” is found, that gets picked up by the fellowship. So the spirituality of the Steps is a little more than just the Steps, but then the Steps take that rigorous spirituality and go to Step Four, where we make a searching fearless, moral inventory of ourselves. And then in Step Five, you tell God and another human being what you have done. It's interesting too, that as people live into the program, they do that the first time, but then they come back a year or two later and do it again, there's an awful lot they didn't notice the first time through! And then sometimes, one of the things that I've done is to do a fearless, moral inventory of all the things that have been given to me, and all the things I need to be grateful for. So it's not always a negative inventory, but it's always a look at self. And it's out of that, that you begin to, hopefully, begin to reach some kind of honesty about self, saying there is a problem. And with that, some kind of movement toward change.

PETER: You anticipated my next question, which was about Step Four, because I was very interested reading in the several places in your book talking about this “searching, fearless moral inventory” that people are asked to take of themselves. And you just clarified that one of the things that you can add to that is to say, “Well, let me be honest about what I have been given.” You know, as opposed to maybe, “what I've earned or come up with myself.”

WARD: [overlapping] “The bad things I’ve done!”
PETER: Right, exactly. But could you give an example of an item or a couple of items that might be on there, just to have a sense of what this kind of inventory is like. Is there a specific question that you ask in order to do this for yourself, or what's that process like?

WARD: The Big Book does list some questions that you might ask, and they will involve things like money, relationships, sexuality, and so on. I mean, it really does cover [a range]. The fact that it's written in the 1930s, it’s kind of amazing what it covers, but it's coming out of a group of men who were being rigorously honest.

PETER: So for example, money, you might ask like, “What are you spending your money on?” or—

WARD: To me, the impact would be how much is money running my life? How much is the desire of money making me make choices and decisions that I don't feel comfortable about? Do I cheat on my taxes? Do I make decisions about not being with people that I love because I want to make more money? I mean, it’s about what's running your life.

[29:36]

PETER: One of the things that you get at early and often in the book is the problem of resentment. At one point, you say, “Resentment is a primary symptom of the bondage to self that is at the heart of not only the alcoholic but at the heart of our human problem. Resentment focuses us on ourselves as having been offended by others. It is less a feeling and more a way of seeing” [p. 39]. So does it connect to a kind of victim mentality that things happen to you?

WARD: Well, it’s a piece of the whole denial process, but it also is particularly destructive because it does keep the focus on self. One of the things that I've learned through this fellowship is that when there's a problem that I'm angry about, that I feel like someone has misjudged me and done some wrong and I've been offended, and I can't let it go, is to move that focus just a little bit to say, What was my role in this happening? Maybe I was too quick in responding, and they responded to that negatively. Maybe there's some ways I can change my behavior that will lighten this resentment. That's how we deal with it in Twelve-Step spirituality. The rector that followed me at Trinity Church—we had a fabulous education program going, both in small groups during the week and on Sunday morning. We would have 80 to 100 people involved in three different classes. We had good youth work. We had good Sunday school. He was not interested in Sunday school, and he actually undercut it. And it's now gone. And there was a little while that I was resenting that, and I thought, “How could he do that? My wonderful program!” And then slowly, I began to say, “You know, Ward, you left that and it's gone and you gotta let go of that.” And part of your behavior is to let it go and to recognize also that “what you did made a difference for the people who were there at that time. That's all you can do anyway, and he brings other abilities and strengths that you need to know about.” And actually we are in some correspondence, and I would say we are friends. And I think that has to do with my working through that resentment and trying to figure out some other ways to number one, let go of my being offended, and number two, try to build some sort of relationship that is at least an honest relationship between the two of us. I don't know if that helps.

PETER: It does. I mean, one of the questions I ask when I'm feeling that way is to say, “Is this really about me?”

WARD: Right!

PETER: “How do I know? I feel like about me, but is it really?” you know, and then sometimes if I take a good hard look—

WARD: And this wasn't about me, this was about him. I mean, it really wasn't about me. Right. but it does take a while to learn that sometimes!

PETER: Sure. Especially when it feels that way at the outset.

[VO]: I asked if there was anything else ward would like to add about how people who are not in recovery can use A.A. principles and practices, as we seek to know what is true.

WARD: Well, let's try to put it in simpler form. One, know that there's stuff you don't know. Know that there are problems you're not facing. Know that your perceptions are not objective, and know that your feelings represent your history, not what's actually there. So the first thing is that kind of humility about knowledge. The second thing is to recognize that that means we need to get help, that knowing that I'm not perceiving things correctly does not change it very much—maybe a little more humility—but I really need to get a power greater than myself that will help me move to sanity. And that power may be another person. It may be another group. I mean, this is why I think small groups are so important in the church, because I think that's where people get challenged, and move, and change. So, the power of a group, the power of a companion, will help us begin to see things a little bit differently, and at that point, then, we are ready to do some fearless moral inventory and to begin to ask God to remove from us these personality defects. One of the things I like about A.A. is they are very clear: We are not striving for perfection but for spiritual progress. I mean, part of my objection to the church is it implies—I don't think it says it—that we should be perfect, and that's a dangerous place to be, because the only way I can be perfect is for me to believe I'm perfect and deny everything else!

[VO]: If this conversation about self-learning is prompting new ideas and questions for you, as it is for me, I invite you to consider supporting this podcast as a financial contributor. There are two easy ways to do it, available from the show page. Just click the button that says Learn about Supporting Point of Learning and you'll find out about how to make a one-time contribution of any amount, or a monthly donation that fits your budget. Nobody can support everything, of course, and the most important thing to me is that you enjoy—and learn something from—the conversations that I showcase here. If you can think of just one other person who might benefit from Ward's insights, please go ahead and share the episode with them. It will mean most coming from you. Thank you! Now, back to my conversation with the Very Rev. Ward Ewing.

[36:06]

PETER: One of my convictions developed through experience, and it's also been reinforced by social science research—so there’s a bit of, you know, “head” stuff in there as well—but that honest sharing between people, whether we're talking about political ideas, or how to work effectively as a group, or working through a challenge as a married couple, is that the kind of sharing that you need in that situation is predicated on trust, which in turn is predicated on respect. So to me, the way I often look at it is that basic respect is the foundation for trust. And then when you have trust, you can really discuss hard things. And so I'm just interested how you've seen this work or develop in A.A., which is not people who have known each other for a long time as a family.

WARD: Right.

PETER: So if I'm coming into a Twelve-Step group for first time, am I apt to share my story then? Or how does trust develop in that kind of context?

WARD: Okay. Let me talk about Al-Anon instead of A.A. Just a bit on this, because in A.A., they come in, because they've absolutely got to. They're at the end of their rope and they need help. And they know that. And they usually don't say anything for the first half a dozen meetings, but they're welcomed and loved and hugged and told, “Keep coming back. It'll change your life. It's good. You're in a good place.” Al-Anon’s a whole lot harder. First of all, the level of resentment—

PETER: I just wanted to clarify, [Al-Anon] is for family members of alcoholics.

WARD: This is family members. Mostly spouses, but it also can be parents. It can be very helpful for parents whose children are headed down the path toward death or insanity. I mean, it's just an awful thing. And of course, the parents want to control the kids because the kids are on a death march. But what they've got to learn is that the kids can't make a decision when the parents are trying to control them. They're only gonna react, and [parents have] got to learn to let go of that, which is really, really difficult! So they come into the group and usually the first time they speak, they share all their resentments about how awful their husband is, or how terrible the situation is with their children and how can they control them. And they're listened to. Nobody says, “You need to change how you're doing this.” And it's not like We've got the answer! It’s that We love you and want to support you, and you'll figure it out. To me, it's the way the church should respond to anybody that walks in the door the first time. But we don't always do that. We’re not great at that. But love and tolerance is the code for A.A. and for Al-Anon. And that means they listen to this … crap, if I may say so, about how terrible the husband is. And they just say, Keep coming back. It'll get better. Stick with us. And after a while, the person who's carrying all that resentment gets tired of it. And sometimes she begins to let go with love, which is a really hard thing to do. I love the phrase they use in Al-Anon: I didn't cause it, I can't control it and I can't fix it. [Described as “the three Cs” on p. 112, with the third term indicated there as “I can’t cure it.] Part of the problem when they walk in is they also feel a lot of guilt that somehow, since the active alcoholic has been blaming them all the time, somehow they must be at fault. And to let that go and learn a new way, it takes a while. For some spouses, it may take a year or more before they really do change the behavior. But when they do, they discover that it's a new place that they're in. And that the drinker now has a choice, which the drinker never had before, because the drinker could only react and only protect his supply and only kind of try to protect his fragile ego. But once the spouse is no longer attacking, blaming, and focused on the drinker, life changes. There are no guarantees they'll go get sober, but their life changes, and it's better for everybody. And in fact, they often do get sober. They often do then go to A.A.

PETER: But the way that that trust then develops, for example in the Al-Anon meeting, is that it is immediately a welcoming, supportive environment. These codes are love and tolerance.

And that, over time, you know, and that's the other ingredient, [time], you keep coming back. WARD: Yeah. Right. And that allows the person then to make some different choices. When you give them the answers, it's no better than the spouse is doing to the drinker! It doesn't change things. It just freezes everything. And for the new person in A.A., when they come in and when they do begin to speak, they may talk about how awful it's been and have some blame and resentments that are there. So it's just, You are welcome. Whatever you think, we are happy to listen to. And we honor you as a human being. Love and tolerance. Wonderful, wonderful code!

[42:17]

PETER: When we spoke last month, getting ready for this conversation, you noted that you are more and more convinced that the only way toward creative knowledge is through a group.

WARD: I would use “creative” in the sense that it will go beyond what I have presently thought about.

PETER: Okay.

WARD: And let me give you an example from my little group in Louisville. One of members of the group was killed in an industrial accident. I was really upset. I was angry. I was angry at the industry that did not have appropriate safety codes. The accident should not have happened. He should not have died. I was really upset. And finally, one of the members of the group said, “Ward, shut up. He died sober. That's a victory. We're not gonna mourn all this other stuff. We're gonna celebrate that he was sober.” And I thought, “Wow!” So that's creative learning, but it comes from a group where you've established a standard of honesty, where you do good listening. I didn't mention listening earlier, but part of what makes a good group is do some training in listening. With the small group work that we did in Buffalo, I think it was the third or fourth session that we spent the whole time talking about listening. And then we talked about it again, and then we talked about it again, because if we're gonna have trust, then we've got to try to, at least try to understand each other. But when I think of “creative,” it's that suddenly the boundaries of my thinking have been expanded is I think what I would would mean by that. And that certainly can come from an artist or an artistic community, but it could also come from a small group, like our little group in Athens that did the conversation about Maus. That pushed some people in ways they might not have otherwise been, and it also included the Jewish community, which in a small Southern town is not very powerful and whose voice is not heard very much. And they were very intentional about being sure their voice was heard at this meeting. So that's what I think I mean by “creative.”

PETER: You wonder at one point in the book—for those reading along at home, this is page 175—you write, “Imagine church-sponsored groups of people with differing political views meeting together over a long period of time.” You know, I love this idea, because of course our politics has not gotten any less toxically divisive since you published these words. And also because civil discourse is a passion of mine and a focus of my professional work.

WARD: Well, part of my transformation in terms of racism was as a senior in high school, I went to this program sponsored by the National Council of Churches. And for the first time in my life, I was a minority! I had been raised in the segregated South. I didn't know there was a problem. I mean, that seems a little unbelievable, but I didn't! It was not a problem that touched me in any way or form. And suddenly my eyes were open. And that's the kind of thing that can happen, but I think we need for people who are willing to come and talk to share. You do have to build that trust. You have to have that respect. You do have to be good listeners. You do have to think about how you're gonna express your ideas when it's a minority opinion. But a group that is tolerant, that's open to different opinions—that welcomes different opinions, in fact, as long as they're honest—and has that kind of standard of honesty, that's gonna change the lives of the people that are in that group. I think it's a piece of how we're gonna move forward with race, sooner or later. It's a piece of how we may someday—I don't know, I think bridging the political differences now is a lot harder than that because we're not getting the same information. But I’m still in touch with some of my folks from Louisville who are in the Trump neighborhood. We don't talk about that, but you know, one of the things you learn is that they have children who are not doing well, or children that are doing well, or they have a car accident, or they have an unforeseen medical expense and you have compassion. You don't have to have agreement. You just need to have a little compassion. And it's amazing how much that opens things up!

PETER: Absolutely. And to recognize, you know, so much of the the programming that we are sold, on networks or over the internet, through advertisements and so forth, these people who collect audiences of millions of people … So much of that plays on a part of ourselves which for most people is actually fairly small, which is to say, what's my political affiliation, you know, what's my team jersey—is it red or blue? But that part is played up because that can be one of the things that, you know, you get people fired up, fearful about, or angry about, and then you've got an audience and, you know, that's what they're coming back for. I think one of the things that can happen if through a group such as you're imagining, or just recognizing the fuller realities of your friends in Louisville, is to say, you know, “I'm more than who I voted for or chose not to vote for in the past election. I’ve got all these things going on in my life.”

WARD: “I'm a human being! A very complex, disorganized, hurt, loved human being!”

PETER: “Broken and blessed.”

WARD: “Broken and blessed,” you bet!

PETER: We are more than that. And I think that's part of—I just keep coming back to the commercialization of it, you know? How much money is involved with some of these big shows in particular. If you look at, you know—not to call anybody out in particular, but somebody like Tucker Carlson, how much money would you have to be paid to say true things, you know? WARD: Right.

PETER: You can't believe some of the things that you're saying—if not many of the things you’re saying—or maybe you've said it enough [that you do], but like, what are you willing to do for this paycheck? Or what wouldn't you be willing to do for a paycheck? And where does that come from? So, I mean, it's just, you know, that profit incentive is—

WARD: Profit and publicity. The number one, I mean, he's the number one most popular, newscaster, right?

PETER: “News.”

WARD: Yeah, “news”! Success? Ours is still a success-oriented, individualistic society. What I think this book proposes is a deep challenge to our culture, which is focused on success, on money, on individual popularity, on individual achievement. And what I'm looking for is some sense of humility, and love and tolerance for others, and openness to ideas that are different. And it ain't gonna happen in a day!

PETER: Absolutely.

WARD: But if we don't find some way to move the toward this, and why I think the spirituality of the Steps is important is because I do think there are some tools there that can help us move toward a society that's less focused on achievement and self-glorification.

[50:30]

PETER: Is there anything that you would've liked me to ask that I did not ask, or anything that came up for you while we were talking that you'd like to circle back to? Any other points that you wanted to make?

WARD: Yeah. One thing, and that has to do with the subjectivity of spiritual experience and spiritual growth. Well, how do we sort out truth—and that takes a community—but also how do we sort out the truth of a spiritual experience, whether you want to use God as a piece of that experience or choose not to, there are some things that happen: A person's life has changed. The person becomes open to change, and that change will be ongoing. There’s a shift from where they were to where they're headed, in a new direction. And I think the ultimate test of that has to do with gratitude, that gratitude is the primary sign of a person who is truly in recovery, that they are moving away from this self-focused, self-preservation mentality to a life of service and openness. And when that happens, they realize—I mean, instrumental in any kind of service work is that we may not fix the problem. We may not be able to fix this, but we are gonna do what we can do, and be grateful that we were able to do that. So gratitude is the sign—I believe the primary sign—of a spiritual experience that has really set a person on new growth, a new direction toward openness, towards love, tolerance, community, support, service.

[VO]: That's it for today's show! My great thanks to Ward Ewing for joining me. More information about his new book, including how to support independent bookstores when you buy a copy, can be found on the show page for this episode, along with a full transcript and other resources. Thanks as always to Shayfer James for outro and intro music. Dates and venues for Shayfer's Spring 2022 tour with Will Wood are also available on the show page. Special thanks to Joshua Lerner for letting me sample some of his guitar virtuosity for today's soundtrack. Now a progressive educator and school leader in Chicago, Josh was not only once my student for AP English Language and Composition, but also my guitar teacher for a few months in the early aughts. Finally, thanks to you for listening, subscribing, sharing, rating, and reviewing this passion project of mine. Point of Learning is written, recorded, edited, mixed, and produced by me here in sunny Buffalo, New York. Financial supporters are listed on the show page. Thinking about joining them? It's a good move for a kid your age! Just click the button for more info. Next month I'll drop another classic episode, but I'll be back soon with an all-new conversation about what and how and why we learn. I'm Peter Horn. See you then!

This Is Radio (Dammit!) Transcript (036)

PETER HALL: Greetings! I’m Peter Hall, co-host of Theater Talk on WBFO, and you’re at the Point of Learning with Peter Horn. In this episode, Peter talks with Bill Siemering. Back in 1962, Siemering was hired to transform WBFO from a student-run college radio club into a professional station. Because of the experiments in radio that he led at WBFO throughout the 1960s, Siemering was invited to serve on the first board of what would become National Public Radio. He was also invited to write the original mission statement of NPR—while he was still working in Buffalo. Siemering went on to help create NPR’s flagship program, All Things Considered, and also what we know today as Fresh Air. Fifty years later, Siemering is still passionate about the power of radio, now doing much of his work in the developing world. I’m looking forward to hearing what Bill and Peter discuss, so let’s enjoy the show! 

PETER HORN (voiceover): On today’s show, Bill Siemering has long been a passionate champion of the unique power of radio …

BILL SIEMERING: Somebody asked me what I did and I said I was managing WBFO. He said, “Oh, it’s just radio?” “Yes. It’s just radio. It’s just radio, dammit!” So that’s why I ended up calling the program This Is Radio, and meant this is radio, dammit, because I wanted people to pay attention to it—the radio medium and appreciate what it could do.

[VO]: At NPR he believed that radio could deliver something different, and cutting-edge …

SIEMERING: I wanted All Things Considered to be the very first broadcast record of the day’s events. I didn’t want it to be second. Because the television comes down at 6:30, PBS came on with kind of a backstory at 7, but I wanted—I wasn’t taking a backseat to anyone.

[VO]: At WHYY in Philadelphia, he helped Terry Gross create a national program …

SIEMERING: Fresh Air, which was such an excellent program. I mean, I’d see the guests leaving after the interview. As a rule, they’d go by my office and they’d say, “You know, that’s the best interview I ever had!” I’d say, “Yeah!” Anyway—

[VO]: Plus, a few secrets …

SIEMERING: This may be too much “inside radio” to know the backstory of how this happened …

[VO]: All that and more, coming right up!

[02:57]

[VO]: Bill Siemering can recall being enthralled by the power of radio as a 6-year-old kid in a two-room schoolhouse in Wisconsin, where educational programs known as “The School of the Air” brought lessons about nature, music, and art alive in his imagination. Two decades later, in the early 1960s, when the popularity of television led many to predict that radio was on its way out, Siemering found himself broadcasting in the fertile soil of Western New York via the student-run station at the University at Buffalo, WBFO. During an extremely creative period in the history of UB, he had license to experiment and a charge from the dean who hired him to grow that small bush of a radio station into a great tree. In one project, Siemering and his staff set up five lines capturing live audio from around the city, and composer Maryanne Amacher altered and mixed the sounds into a 28-hour composition called “City Links WBFO” that they broadcast non-stop. Listeners became aware of the music in their environment, and checked the sound of the city as they might check a weather report. They could hear a steel-cutting saw and workers changing shifts at the Bethlehem Steel factory, airplanes coming in, and a machine at General Mills that sounded like musical bells. Experiments like this, and others that he and I are about to mention, made Siemering only more impassioned in his advocacy for what radio could do better—there, I said it!—than television. He began to write about what he and his staff were doing, imagining the possibilities of the transition from educational radio to what was starting to be called “public” radio. After the passage of the landmark 1967 legislation that created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Siemering was asked to serve on the founding Board of Directors for National Public Radio, and then to draft what became known as the NPR “mission statement” in 1970. Over 50 years later, current NPR staffers can still quote chunks of it, and several say that it’s more important now than ever. Here’s a few lines, so you have the flavor. National Public Radio:

“… will promote personal growth rather than corporate gains; it will regard individual differences with respect and joy rather than derision and hate; it will celebrate the human experience as infinitely varied rather than vacuous and banal; it will encourage a sense of active constructive participation, rather than apathetic helplessness. … The total service should be trustworthy, enhance intellectual development, expand knowledge, deepen aural esthetic enjoyment, increase the pleasure of living in a pluralistic society, and result in a service to listeners which makes them more responsive, informed human beings and intelligent citizens of their communities and the world.”

Again, that’s just a taste. It is a beautiful piece of writing, replete with comments and discussion, and I have a link to it for you on the show page. Siemering went on to work at WHYY in Philadelphia, home of Fresh Air with Terry Gross, which he helped move from a local to a national show. A MacArthur Fellow and recipient of numerous other awards he has asked me not to mention, Bill has focused in recent decades on applications of radio for health and civil society in the developing world.

[06:47]

HORN: I wanna begin with the particular magic and power of radio as a medium, particularly how you began to experiment with it in the 1960s at WBFO in Buffalo, the decade before you helped to create National Public Radio. Let me tell you what I think I know, and then what I’m wondering. So I think I know that The School of the Air for you as a child as young as six, a first- grader going to school in a two-room schoolhouse outside Madison, Wisconsin, possibly literally growing up in the shadow of the radio tower of WHA, now Wisconsin Public Radio, one of the oldest continuously broadcasting radio stations in the U.S. I also believe that you were 13 or so when you were helping out on a farm, and you observed that the farmers came in to check out agricultural news and the weather report there. So as a student, you had The School of the Air, which had art and music and science and nature studies. You knew that there was important information that was translated to people via radio. Radio was something that you worked on in college, as student staff at the station. So all of that makes sense to me, but how you go from that basis—then understanding that there are these particular functions that radio can serve in a community—to doing the kinds of things that you were doing in Buffalo, for example inviting members of the Tuscarora Nation to tell their story themselves in their own voice, going door to door in communities on the East Side [of Buffalo, NY], in the early ‘60s, talking with African Americans about what it’s like to be Black in the United States. These seem to be radical democratic experiments, and I don’t necessarily see a straight line between these kinds of traditional uses of radio. Where did some of those ideas come for you about what you wanted to try to do? And I’m just using Buffalo as an example, because I know some of the things specifically that you did there.

SIEMERING: That’s an interesting question. Because coming from WHA, which is quite a straight operation in Madison, to Buffalo … When I went to Buffalo, the Dean of Students, Dean [Richard] Siggelkow, who I knew from Madison—he was a teacher of mine there—he said, “This is just a small bush right now, but you can help grow it.” I took that as a license to be experimental. And he backed me up all the time on this. As a university station, it should be experimental in a way that it wasn’t at Wisconsin. And as this was a student station when I arrived there—they were off the air in the summers and went on the air in the afternoons at 5 after classes. And so it wasn’t taken seriously, I don’t think, in the community or by the university. So my curiosity was to go out and discover these things. And so I discovered the Tuscarora near Niagara Falls—

[VO]: Tuscarora is one of the six indigenous nations that comprise the world’s oldest participatory democracy. Once called “Iroquois” by the French, the confederacy of nations to which the Tuscarora belong is now known more widely by its own name, the Haudenosaunee.

SIEMERING: So I did this series with them called “A Nation Within a Nation.” Again, voices that hadn’t been heard on the radio before, basically. You mentioned I had a series called “To Be Negro.” This is in the ‘60s, but what is it like to be a Black person in our society? Now that’s something that people are doing all the time now, to hear Black voices that hadn’t been heard and to hear their story. But I was doing it back then, being aware of the racial tensions. This is coming out of the ‘60s where, you know, there were demonstrations after Martin Luther King’s assassination, and before there were other reasons to be demonstrating—the inequality. So that led to bringing the studio to the heart of the Black community where 27 hours a week originated—

[VO]: Just briefly underscoring how cool this must have been, and we’re talking about 1969, 1970 at this point. Bill ardently maintains what many networks in the U.S. tend to forget: the airwaves belong to the people, so WBFO and the local residents draw up guidelines together for this storefront broadcast studio on Buffalo’s East Side, which basically provides WBFO’s programming from Friday night to Sunday afternoon. Despite that there were at this point two local commercial stations aimed at an African American audience, a DJ at this storefront center named Ed Smith was the first in Buffalo to broadcast R&B legend Roberta Flack!

SIEMERING: We organized a Black Arts Festival, and people brought in their poetry and we published it, and the program guide with photographs. We had a live jazz concert and everything. Again, a celebration of Black culture that Caucasians were unaware of at that time. So I was keenly aware, in Buffalo, particularly, of social conflicts and the social issues that I wasn’t aware of in Madison, because there weren’t those kinds of issues that were being discussed there, but this was a different environment. And I was taking pleasure, I guess, in discovering, if you will, how radio could be used for social change.

[13:52]

SIEMERING: As you know, SUNY Buffalo was regarded as the “Berkeley of the East.” There were maybe some other schools that claimed that title, but Buffalo really meant it, I think, in terms of the ferment and the excitement. There were wonderful writers, you know, Robert Creeley, Leslie Fiedler, John Barth, to name a few. There were the creative associates in music, with Lukas Foss kind of guiding that—and Allen Sapp was also the director of the Music Department where there was a lot of creativity brewing. So there was a spirit of experimentation, if you will. With radio, I took that to be an invitation. There was a festival of the arts over at the Albright-Knox art gallery, and we broadcast much of that. There was a series of culture programs at the historical museum on Sunday nights, I think it was, with different ethnic groups that represent Buffalo. And I would lug the recorder over there and record those. I think it was that spirit of experimentation, of trying stuff, that informed me in writing the [NPR] mission statement. But also, I had anger at the dismissive way radio was treated generally, especially by television, and anger at the absence of dealing with social issues in commercial radio and media. I was really angry. Television tried to push radio out of the original Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

HORN: They wanted it to be just the Corporation for Public Television.

SIEMERING: Right. Because they said radio is an embarrassment that takes money, of course, away from the “important things” like television. And I remember somebody asking me what I did and I said I was managing WBFO. He said, “Oh, it’s just radio?” “Yes. It’s just radio. It’s just radio, dammit!” So that’s why I ended up calling the program This Is Radio, and I meant this is radio, dammit, because I wanted people to pay attention to it—the radio medium and appreciate what it could do. And it grew out of covering the riots at UB, starting on February 25th, I think it was, 1970. It went on for three weeks. The police occupied the campus and there was tear-gassing and all that stuff—

[VO]: Ferment about the Vietnam War and other social issues had led to varying degrees of unrest on many college campuses by the time UB seemed to explode in late February 1970. On February 24th, Buffalo Police were summoned to a UB basketball game on account of a demonstration against allegations of racism in the athletics department. The next day, 50 students went to the office of Acting President Peter Regan, demanding an explanation for the cops. Rocks and chunks of ice were thrown at the president’s windows. Campus police responded, about 500 students eventually assembled and things deteriorated from there, with a firebomb destroying hundreds of books in a campus library, a State Supreme Court judge issuing multiple restraining orders, demonstrations of up to 2000 students and faculty at one point, sustained tension with police culminating in a public pig roast on March 10th and a March 12th confrontation resulting in the injury of 58 people, including 35 police officers. Despite that the radio station was located in a building that was at one point tear-gassed by the police, Bill and his WBFO team produced 140 hours of coverage!

HORN: So this was three weeks of active confrontation. And this was part of what you presented these differing perspectives on.

SIEMERING: Right. For example, I had on the Acting President [Peter] Regan, who was making the decisions. I asked him, “So how are your decisions—where were you when you decided to okay the police to tear-gas the union building where our studios happen to be located?” And he explained what information he had and why he okayed that. And I said, “How are your decisions affected by your being a candidate to be named permanent president?” He said, “I’ve withdrawn my name from that consideration because I wanted to be able to make those decisions independently of that.” “Good,” I thought. So then I talked to the leader of the student movement. I said, “Terry, what influenced you? You went to parochial schools, and you started at Canisius College, and so what influenced you to be a leader of this movement?” And he said, “Well, I was arrested for a civil rights demonstration and put in county jail, and I had this professor and I read these books, and that’s what made me do these things.” So I was saying, on air, “You see, there are different perceptions of reality, but different people are operating in different ways. And if you have another point of view, come on down and we’ll have that on the air.” So we broadcast the town halls that they had, and all these things. And as I said, I think it was over 140 hours. And we got praised for it in the Courier-Express [a now-defunct Buffalo newspaper]. Jack Allen said it was a “voice of reason amidst the chaos.” So that gave me some confidence in what I had written for the [NPR] “mission statement,” if you will. And I thought, “Let’s carry this on.” After this kind of wall-to-wall coverage of, I said, “Let’s do this.” And that’s where Fresh Air came from. I started This Is Radio, which was an afternoon program that had writers, musicians, sometimes news. We’d come back from a [Buffalo] City Council saying, “Here’s this really interesting exchange with, you know, Councilman Lewandowski,” and they’d play a clip and I’d say, “You can hear the whole thing on the news tonight at 6:30.” You know, that kind of thing. So I was having fun with radio, using radio as a live, vital medium. And after I left for NPR, Terry Gross became the host of This Is Radio. When they moved to Philadelphia, the producer [Danny Miller] and Terry renamed it Fresh Air. That’s the story of the history, the genetic history, if you will, of Fresh Air!

[21:31]

[VO]: Bill’s WBFO program called This Is Radio directly inspired at least two other shows. Fresh Air was one—and we talk more about its host, UB alumna Terry Gross, later on. But All Things Considered also owed lots to the experiments first conducted on This Is Radio, especially in its first year. Here’s a clip from the very first broadcast of All Things Considered, May 3rd, 1971. It’s a brilliant audio document of the anti-war protest that took place in DC earlier that day. The clip is four minutes in length, which will probably feel long by today’s standards, but consider this: the full report on that first broadcast was a sound collage lasting 23 minutes! Buckle up. This is radio!

[Excerpt from ATC story by Jeff Kamen, May 3, 1971. Edited by Susan Stamberg and Linda Wertheimer, inter alia, by the way.]

[26:47]

[VO]: Now how could I make an episode about the roots of public radio without including a pledge drive? True story: WBFO was the first station I pledged to, back in the fall of 1987, when I was in seventh grade. I liked what I heard when I listened to my local NPR station, and WBFO was mom-and-pop enough in those days to actually read the names of new and renewing members on the air. As a result, when I rolled into school the next morning, my health teacher, Mr. Jack Anthony, greeted me with his hand outstretched. He’d heard my name on the radio. “Congratulations,” he boomed. “You did a good thing.” Membership feels good, as I’m guessing you already know. If you don’t currently contribute to public radio, please consider supporting your local NPR station. I don’t need to tell you that fact-based reporting is an endangered species, and nobody does it better than NPR. And while I’ve got you, if you’re not yet a member of this podcast community, I invite you to join today. If you can swing it, get in how you fit in, with a small monthly donation or a one-time gift. It all helps to support this passion project of mine to share great ideas about what and how and why we learn, subsidizing, for example, audio equipment and batteries and gas money for a trip to Philly to interview a radio visionary. Details for how to donate are on the show page, and thank you! Back to the show. 

[28:21]

HORN: To your mind, is there a way that radio, or audio, is particularly suited to do this sort of thing well—letting people hear people, or understand people, in their own voice?

SIEMERING: Well, the voice is so expressive. The human voice is so expressive, and that comes through because you’re focusing just on that. You don’t have distracting pictures, if you will. And I think if you brought in lights and cameras and so on, it would change the environment in which somebody is talking. And for the listener, they can focus on this— People talk about how they love radio. “I just love radio”: I often hear this from listeners. I don’t hear them say, “I just love television”—somehow. Because they’re making a connection, because they create the image of who is talking, so they have an investment in what’s being said, in a way. I mean, they own the picture of the scene that’s being set for them. The voice is so important. You can just focus on that and it gets to your heart. It goes through your mind into your heart.

HORN: The voice is every bit, I believe, as unique as a fingerprint.

SIEMERING: Exactly!

HORN: In terms of how it registers, and how hear it. And as you were talking—I know that you have spoken elsewhere, or perhaps written elsewhere as well, about a kind of greater affinity between print media and radio, perhaps, than between than radio and television, in some ways—in terms of how one works, and so forth. And I was thinking about one way I would talk with students—because I felt like part of my job as an English teacher was to sell books, you know, like the idea of reading a book, you know, and to say that one of my goals was to find one book for you. If you’ve never found one, if you’ve never actually finished a book, how can we do this? And one of the ways to talk about it, a way that actually registered quite a bit with kids, was to say it’s one of the few media available, a.) without advertising. You’re not gonna have a pop-up ad, you know? But also, once you get into it, you can construct the scene. You can construct the people, the characters, with the unlimited production budget of your own mind.

SIEMERING: Right!

HORN: And you get to know them in a way that that really feels quite different than Okay, this is Scarlett Johansson playing this part, so I see see her when I think of this character. Another thing that your comment reminded me of is this profound feeling of intimacy. I think one of my first—speaking of the power of radio in the Midwest!—one of the first things that prompted me to fall in love with radio was Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, listening to the monologues and just like tuning into—you know, it was listening with my father, and so that was an association—with both parents, but my dad was a Presbyterian minister. I feel like anybody who’s got a connection to Prairie Home Companion either has a relationship to the Midwest or to mainline Protestantism—I think you have to have one or both of those for it to click, especially if you’re not in Minnesota, for example! Listening to those stories, I was just taken away as a kid—you know, I was not in his target audience! I was like a seven- or eight-year-old, you know, just getting all involved with the goings-on at the Chatterbox Cafe, but it was captivating to me. I was just gonna contrast—I enjoyed it so much that I went to see him, I think maybe even twice, when he came to Town Hall. He would do that frequently in New York City, he’d come in the winter time especially, he would do shows there. And I liked seeing “how the sausage was made,” if you will, you know, to see a radio show on stage and to see the prop table, you know, and all the [sound] effects and stuff like that. And to see what he looks like, because you know, I constructed my whole picture— (I mean that happens in radio all the time. You say, “What does this person look like?” And you’re just always wrong!) But there was also something about it that was just visually distracting. You know, I didn’t enjoy the monologue as much, because I was looking at everything. It was very different from the experience of just like even while I’m doing dishes, not giving it my full attention, but still it’s filling up my mind. So there’s an intimacy about it. There’s an immersion, you know, that’s pretty different from television.

SIEMERING: We’re living in the age of audio. With podcasts like this one—there are, I think, probably a million of them, I don’t know.

HORN: I think that’s true.

SIEMERING: And when you have the editor of The New Yorker—

HORN: David Remnick.

SIEMERING: Yes, the prototype of print, I guess, or, you know, what’s traditionally thought of as print doing radio, and the New York Times also having audio—

HORN: The Daily.

SIEMRING: The Daily, and so on. And NPR is the largest, or second-largest publisher of podcasts, which says a lot about the quality of NPR programming, that out of a million options, they would rise to that. So, just as John Opera was saying in your last program about photographs now being ubiquitous, audio is everywhere. And as you pointed out earlier, people are streaming. They’re not listening to the box of the radio so much, except in the car. And I think radio has much more in common with print than they do with television, first because—this is a generalization, but we tend to be on the introvert side—because we can be in public without being seen. And we’re working with ideas without showing pictures, so we’re describing scenes and so on. It works for us that way. And Terry Gross has talked about this. She is a shy person by nature and talks about the microphone as her way of talking to people. I mean, she’s learned to make wonderful presentations to a large audience, but by nature, she is shy.

HORN: I’ve seen some of those too. And I think she remarked at one point that she actually— you know, as long as it’s good audio quality—she prefers sometimes to do a telephone interview, or as opposed to being, you know, in the same room with somebody.

SIEMERING: Oh yes. Right. Because she can spread out her notes and doesn’t have to worry about eye contact.

[35:45]

HORN: I found a detail in Jack Mitchell’s book about public radio called Listener Supported that I didn’t read anywhere else about you, which is that while you were a student at the University of Wisconsin and a member of the WHA Radio student staff, you were also training for a career as a high school guidance counselor. This immediately made a great deal of sense to me, because of your belief that qualities like empathy and curiosity are essential for a good interviewer. Of course, they’re also critical for a good counselor. Do you believe that your interest in psychology, in connecting with people, informed your different approach to the possibilities of radio and what radio could reveal about people?

SIEMERING: People open up if you treat them with respect. If you’re on the attack, you just get a defense and they shut down and they’re not gonna open up. I think one of the secrets of Terry Gross as an interviewer is that she listens intently, as a therapist might. And she also does her homework. She reads the book and she does the research necessary to have a good interview, so that people sense that she respects them—by her research. And by the way, she’s asking questions and listening—she may have her list of questions, but she will go down a new path as they open it up for her. And I think that’s why they feel connected to her in a way, and show so much respect to her: because she shows the respect to them. I think it’s the basis of it. You approach them with respect as a person, not as an adversary, or somebody that you can keep attacking and get at something.

HORN: Well, and I think it’s your idea of talking with—

SIEMERING: Yes. Not about—

HORN: —talking with, and not about the people that you’re “covering,” you know, and allowing them to speak as well and handing them the microphone. That’s one of the real differences. I don’t know that you were baiting me with this, you know, Terry Gross’s [questioning technique], so I’m gonna see how this works! Because when Terry interviewed you and Susan Stamberg— in, this was late April, but it was in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of All Things Considered, which was—

SIEMERING: May 3rd.

TERRY GROSS: This is Fresh Air and I’m Terry Gross. Next month, May 3rd, will mark the 50th anniversary of NPR and All Things Considered.

HORN: May 3rd, 1971-2021, 50 years. She noted:

GROSS: Bill holds a special place in my life and the life of our show. From 1978 to ‘87, he was the station manager at WHYY, where our show is produced. Fresh Air began as a local show, and it would never have become a national show without him. But that’s a story for another time …

HORN: Again, there was a big anniversary of NPR to talk about. Now because one of the items on my podcast bucket list is to scoop Fresh Air, I wonder if you’d be willing to say something about the process.

SIEMERING: This may be too much “inside radio” to know the backstory of how this happened … I knew that stations were agitating to have All Things Considered, which started at 5 then to start an hour earlier, at 4. And reporters thought, It’s hard enough to get a 5 o’clock deadline! I wanted All Things Considered to be the very first broadcast record of the day’s events. I didn’t want it to be second. Because the television comes down at 6:30, PBS came on with kind of a backstory at 7, but I wanted—I wasn’t taking a backseat to anyone. I wanted radio to be upfront about it. So I thought Fresh Air, which was such an excellent program. I mean, I’d see the guests leaving after the interview. As a rule, they’d go by my office and they’d say, “You know, that’s the best interview I ever had!” I’d say, “Yeah!” Anyway, I so believed in Fresh Air and its staff. Yes, it’s Terry, but it’s Danny Miller who is the executive producer. He’s been there ever since I’ve been here—43 years—and the staff are the ones that come up with the story ideas and so on. Anyway, so I said, “Let’s envision this so that Terry’s interviews are longer in the first hour and then they get shorter, so they’re the same pace, the same length of All Things Considered pieces at the end, so it’ll be seamless.” And to further make it seamless, we had a live promo with Robert Siegel, who was hosting All Things Considered. So Terry would say about 10 minutes in, “So Robert, what do you have tonight?” And he would say what the rundown was. So it was seamless. It would be like presenting kind of the art section of a newspaper or the style section, whatever, you know, as a lead-in to All Things Considered. It would be the same high quality, great, interesting interviews, and it would be a perfect way for stations to have something starting at 4 that would be totally complementary to All Things Considered.

[42:23]

HORN: Wikipedia credits you with incorporating music and sound and compelling storytelling into radio programming since your days at WBFO. They also say you played a key role in crafting NPR’s distinctive sound. And I know I’ve read about this—you wanted to have it be an identifiable—

SIEMERING: —daily product.

HORN: Daily product. Right? So that you’d listen to it and you’d know that you were hearing

NPR.

SIEMERING: I think, in all fairness, I outlined an intention, but I am given too much credit for the actual—what you hear on the radio. I think I would rather be regarded as like a recruiter for an orchestra. I recruited the talent and maybe like the oboe player playing so [musicians] can tune their instruments to that [i.e.,] the mission statement. Because they’re the ones that create the music. So that said, what I intended was that All Things Considered would treat the arts as an equal part of daily life and of importance as what’s going on in Washington or wherever, as the news. And so that listening to a poet would be as natural as listening to an academic talking about the Supreme Court or something. It also provided the listener with a respite from the intensity of hard news, because they can think more reflectively when they hear a poet taking them in a very different place in their minds. So the different textures, if you will, is what I was looking for. And the sound I wanted happened to be materialized in Susan Stamberg, who has this very expressive voice. And it exudes curiosity and compassion and caring. And she, to me, had the best voice sound for what I wanted NPR to sound like.

[VO]: Before I share a clip to illustrate Susan Stamberg’s singular voice and on-air presence, it’s worth noting the basic fact that she is a woman. Fifty years ago, when Bill installed her as co-host of All Things Considered, Stamberg was the first woman in the United States to host a nightly news program. Here’s a clip from her 1977 interview with the writer Joan Didion, itself a great example of Siemering’s vision for NPR that the hard news of the day should be tempered with forays into the arts and ideas more durable than a single news cycle. (Susan Stamberg later ranked this conversation among her favorite of the more than 15,000 interviews she conducted during her years as co-host of All Things Considered.) The clip runs just under two minutes, and starts with Stamberg speaking about Didion’s writing.

[46:05]

SUSAN STAMBERG: Her best nonfiction essays are collected in the 1968 book Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Here’s a quote from her introduction to that book: “My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember. Writers are always selling somebody out.”

JOAN DIDION: That’s an odd quote. When I go to colleges to talk, people are always asking me about “writers are always selling somebody out.” And all I meant by it was that it is impossible to describe anybody—a friend, or somebody you know very well—and please them, because your image of them, no matter how flattering, never corresponds with their self-image, it’s a—

STAMBERG: So you’re either “short” or “long,” right?

DIDION: Right. Yes.  

STAMBERG: Now I hear it a different way. For my work, I hear it as, right now sitting here, wanting to talk to you about the things that most concern you in your life, and feeling I could never do that, because there’s no reason I should rip off your emotions and privacy to make my living. That’s how I hear this line.

DIDION: Really?

STAMBERG: Yes.

DIDION: I meant something so specific by it.

STAMBERG: But I’m saying the same thing you are, in a different way.

DIDION: Yes.

STAMBERG: You know, give me my great story. You know, tell me about your nervous breakdown, how awful it was. Give me my great radio tape, you know, and knowing I could never dare, never dare to ask that—or whatever it was, you know, or whatever—because it simply would invade a kind of privacy that’s nobody’s damn business.

[VO]: I know, right? So back to this question of the distinctive NPR sound with Bill, where I had the exciting experience of him shaking up what I thought I was asking about. I thought I was asking really about sound design, like you know how when you’re driving in a strange part of the country and you scan around the bottom end of the FM dial, you can tell when you’ve hit an NPR station—regardless of who’s talking or what music might be playing—it just sounds different? Some of it is clarity, some of it is vocal quality and how voices are miked. But Bill was reminding me that the NPR difference really starts with substance—the right mix of content ...

HORN: It starts with saying, Let’s say that “the news” is not just what happened, or that what is going to be of interest to people on a given date is not just the political goings-on, you know, that there are also cultural goings-on. In fact, those things are necessary for us as full human beings who are not just, you know, interested in the next kind of budget or political crisis—

SIEMERING: And to hear from the Midwest, a farmer from the Midwest.

HORN: Yes.

SIEMERING: And to hear from a fisherman in California, or whatever, to take people to those places. That was part of wanting the country to hear itself. That’s what the national program can do.

HORN: Yeah. And so, there was certainly the device, or the trope of the so-called “man on the street” that predated National Public Radio. Is that the case?

SIEMERING: Yes.

HORN: But it was generally kind of, I don’t know, tokenism or artificial, or kind of just like as much to say, Look at all this guy doesn’t know, or whatever, as opposed to saying, Here’s somebody who’s intimately involved with this situation, the fishing crisis or what have you, or just what life is like here. Okay. Wow.

[49:54]

[VO]: Once you’re attuned to Bill’s conviction that people should tell their own story in their own voice, you hear it everywhere in NPR programming, starting with the very first minute of the very first broadcast of All Things Considered, from May 3rd, 1971. After host Robert Conley, the first voice you hear is a nurse telling about her own struggle with heroin addiction.

[Excerpt from top of first ATC broadcast, May 3, 1971. In conversation with Terry Gross last year, Bill and Susan Stamberg revealed that the featured story involving the nurse and mother identified as “Janice” was not actually ready by the time they started the broadcast. Fortunately, it was completed by the time it was scheduled to air!]

[51:32]

[VO]: Since 1993 Bill has worked internationally, assisting community radio stations and supporting initiatives for civil society in Eastern Europe and Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

HORN: Even as traditional radio has morphed for many U.S. citizens into the audio experience of podcasts or streaming services, in many parts of the world, radio remains an indispensable daily feature of life. I’d love for you to share anything that’s top of mind about your international work.

SIEMERING: What we would generally do with Developing Radio Partners, which was the NGO I started in 2004, is we would have a workshop where we would have a presenter on a topic—it could be health services for teens, or it could be climate change information for farmers, things like that. Then we would give the participants a digital recorder and microphone, and they’d go out and record things and come back and critique them, and then we would have our mentor go out after that and be at the stations to work with them—Martha Zulu, who spoke all the local languages, and so on. So it wasn’t a Caucasian coming in from America teaching. It was people knowledgeable there doing the teaching. As an example, in Malawi, there was a great increase in the number of young people that went to the clinic to get information about reproductive health, or HIV testing. And the parents were on board with this, and the religious leaders and so on, so that the kids could prevent getting pregnant or being shipped off to marry somebody. There was one case where Florence, who was a child bride to a man 10 years older than she was when she was 16, and she found it to be physically and emotionally abusive. And then when she listened to the youth-friendly health services program, which was called Let’s Shine, she said, “It gave me the courage to get out of the mess I was in.” And her mother was also listening. And she said, “I wanted her to feel welcome and loved when she got home. I also wanted to make sure to keep the reproductive health conversation going between us so she doesn’t have an early pregnancy.” That’s the kind of very practical things that go on. Then in Sierra Leone, we helped facilitate creating an independent radio network there, where prior to an election, they presented people talking about their concerns. They were divided kind of north-south, like we are [in the U.S.]. And they said, “You know, we’re not as divided as we thought we were. It’s the politicians that are dividing us. We care about the same things.” So then when they had Ebola there, the radio stations took a lead in informing people about what they needed to do. Again, with COVID, they were able to present the information about wearing masks and so on, getting vaccinated, because they could speak in local languages. There are three languages, maybe, in that community. And it’s the most trusted source of information in many of these countries, the local radio station. In Mozambique if they had trouble with a nurse at the clinic, they would come to the radio station. If they had a problem with the police, they would come there. And they would investigate and get back to them, and make this public if it was necessary.

HORN: Wow.

SIEMERING: So that’s the power of radio in development. So it’s really inspiring to see how it works.

[55:47]

[VO]: Agreed! And that’s it for today’s show! My great thanks to Bill Siemering for welcoming me into his beautiful home just outside Philly, just before omicron went nuts last month. Thanks as always to Shayfer James for intro and outro music. Within the episode, I sampled some variations on the All Things Considered theme music by Don Voegli, and the cut “Compared to What?” from Roberta Flack’s 1969 debut album First Take. The Fresh Air theme was composed by Joel Forrester. A Prairie Home Companion’s theme, “The Tishomingo Blues” by Spencer Williams, was covered by the incomparable Mark Wright. Point of Learning is written, recorded, edited, and mixed by me here in Sunny Buffalo. I’m Peter Horn, and I’m so glad you’re here. If you can think of just one other person who would dig this episode—perhaps you know an NPR superfan like me?—please go ahead and share it with them—it will mean most coming from you. I’ll be back just as soon as I can with another show all about what and how and why we learn. See you then!

On Photography Transcript (035)

DAVID LaROCCA: Greetings! This is David LaRocca, and you are at the Point of Learning with my friend Peter Horn. In this episode, Pete will be talking with photographer and professor John Opera, whose artistic innovations I began writing about some 20 years ago. More recently, I engaged his work in a chapter of the book Photography’s Materialities [Leuven University Press, 2021] and interviewed him for the journal Afterimage. For me, John’s always evolving body of work offers up an exceptional opportunity to explore the nature of art, especially in the literal sense, bringing natural materials into conversation with manufactured ones. John provides occasion to consider the dynamic, uncanny zones of overlap between photography and painting. I met John when we were nine years old, and a while later, in high school, he and I shared many hours taking photographs on the streets of Buffalo, New York and developing film and prints and our friendship. We also reveled in more than a few adventures with our beloved host, Pete. You’re in for a treat. Enjoy the show!

[01:28]

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today’s show, artist and professor John Opera.

JOHN OPERA: The goal is not to take an ordinary photograph of an extraordinary subject. Anyone can go to Niagara Falls and take a halfway decent photograph. It’s really about going to the ordinary, or approaching things that we might feel are banal and trying to transform or transcend what they typically stand for, what they’re typically about …

[VO]: Opera shares some of how and why he came to push at the traditional boundaries of photography:

OPERA: Photography is a medium about recollection and repetition. It’s not a medium where you generate new things, typically, which is maybe why I really want to—

HORN: Bust that wide open!

OPERA: Why I do that. Now I do that.

[VO]: And some of what art does and does not say about the artists:

OPERA: I’ve never really felt compelled to reveal myself too much to the viewer because I don’t think that’s why I make the work. And that’s not what the work is about. I think of myself as being really present, and kind of reconfiguring things in a process, for example, to see what I can discover, and it always has to be about perception. I mean, we’re ultimately talking about visual reality here, and visual language. So I think I’m just always looking for that surprise.

[03:13]

[VO]: Assistant professor and head of the photography program at the State University of New York at Buffalo, John Opera has exhibited his critically acclaimed photographs for over two decades in dozens of galleries, from New York to LA, from Mexico City to Basel, Switzerland. His work has been featured in numerous reviews, articles, and other publications, from Artforum to The New Yorker. Admired by new creators as well as established artists who are now in their 80s, John often invents tools and techniques to push the limits of photography, sometimes putting a new spin on nineteenth-century processes, sometimes developing a completely novel apparatus, for example involving a homemade turntable or a laser, as he explores fresh modes of painting with light. The son of a scientist and a social worker, Opera is an artist keenly focused on how we see the complexity of the multifaceted world around us—and within us. He’s also my oldest best friend—since 5th grade—and we talk or text pretty much every day, so despite that I’ve wanted to do an interview with him since I started making podcasts, I always worried that it would be hard for us to stay on task. I was right about that, but fortunately I’ve had some time in the three months since I recorded this interview in mid-August to think about how I wanted to shape hours of raw tape into the highlights you’re about to hear. As the lucky beneficiary of a mini-gallery of Opera pieces amassed over the last 30 years, I think the thing I love most about John’s approach is that he explores each path he takes as fully and painstakingly as he can before embarking on some tangent that is more technically challenging and interesting to him, which opens new ways for the rest of us to see. As I lay out in just a minute, I relied for inspiration for some questions on Susan Sontag’s 1977 collection of essays called On Photography.

[05:24]

HORN: I’ve wanted to have you on the show for a long time, because I’m a huge fan of your work. But part of the challenge is we know each other so well and I feel like we could talk about just anything, so I went ahead and read Susan Sontag’s On Photography, which is a book I’ve wanted to read for a long time, and this was a nice excuse to do it, in order to use some of her ideas as a kind of harness, or a point of departure. And so to start with, there’s something magical about the power of images. Sontag talks about even the simple act of tacking a poster above a bed, or keeping a picture of a loved one in your wallet—nowadays in your phone—or having a political person that you support, a candidate on a lapel pin; these images help us, in her words— They can be seen as “attempts to contact or lay claim to another reality” [p. 16]. And I realized when I read this, that there’s something always something magical about what photographs convey or maybe how they convey me when I look at them. But it’s just that there are so many photographs in our world today that I don’t often stop to pause and think about the power, the kind of magic that is contained in the photographic image. How does that resonate with you?

OPERA: First of all, when you’re talking about the ubiquity, or the hyper-prevalence, or the saturation, of images in our world—you know, everything that surrounds us … in a way, I think we have become very desensitized to images. Maybe the magical aspects don’t immediately register today, just because of how ingrained they are. But the thing you brought up about Sontag: it’s a  really interesting  idea, a condition of the medium, that’s been reframed and described many times. That passage that you’re speaking about from On Photography, Sontag’s book, reminds me very much of a very compatible idea that [art theorist, critic, and professor] Rosalind Krauss put forward around the same time. The way she frames it is that a photograph is indexical, that it literally points to something in the world, but it is not that thing. It’s a departure from that thing. And it has these, maybe magical properties in the sense that we allow ourselves to enter into the reality of photographs, mistaking [that reality] for our own. But I think the magic, or the point is it’s not our own world. It just shares in—to quote another writer I love: [American art historian and critical theorist] Kaja Silverman says it has all the surface appearances of the world, but that’s about it. And, that’s maybe a deceptive attribute. But also, you know, I think where the magic resides—the strangeness or the uncanniness.

HORN: You mentioned the ubiquity of photographs, photographic images. We all—any of us who have a smartphone today—are carrying around a camera that’s probably as good as anything anybody could have gotten in terms of a digital camera at 20 years ago. And everybody’s got one. But still there are people who will—you know, seventh-graders and what have you—get fired up about like getting a Nikon, getting a Canon, like an old-fashion camera (sometimes with film) and walk into a situation and have the camera strap and the camera and go into it. And there seems to be something different about that engagement with your environment, that engagement with other people, when you have a physical camera—as opposed to just, you know, taking out your iPhone and snapping a few photographs. How do you think about that difference as somebody who has navigated the world with a camera and an iPhone? What happens, in terms of how people react with you or how you feel? What is different about those experiences?

OPERA: I think part of the answer lies in how technology has developed over the last 150 years. For example, with photography, as it’s evolved since its invention, or since its harnessing—however you want to describe that moment in history—this kind of began with Ford, Henry Ford, “Fordism,” and Kodak, where one of the first things they wanted to do was really hide or obfuscate the process of photography. And that’s what democratized photography too; you know, simplifying the process and basically creating a black box scenario where we’ve become further and further distanced from the source of what makes a photograph a photograph. And I think that’s part of it: when a student holds—you know, like you said, a Nikon or a Canon in their hand, that then I think is a moment of awareness, of this is about perception. This is about an intentional investigation into perception. But I also think that that happens because they’re closer to the process. They’re inside of it instead of separated from it—or they’re at least closer to being inside of it, say loading a roll of film, and then taking that film and having to learn how to load it on a reel in complete darkness and so on and so forth. The other thing that I think students don’t realize they’re going to encounter initially is the latency of photography. You know, for many, many years you would take a photograph and you wouldn’t see the results for two weeks, six months—however long it took you to develop that roll of film. And whatever the temporality is of it, that distance between the moment of capture and seeing that image literally emerge in a darkroom, it’s very different than the instant gratification of cell phone technology. And that really mirrors, you know, many other aspects of our culture today, this disposability, the immediacy, the, you know, all that stuff, the dopamine—

HORN: The dopamine hit.

OPERA: Yeah. Let’s take that hit!

[13:08]

HORN: We are sitting here, oddly enough, in a place that is your studio—

OPERA: Correct!

HORN: But seriously, oddly enough, through whatever coincidence these things happen, it was once upon a time, decades ago, your dad’s elementary—was it his second grade classroom? We are sitting in a defunct school.

OPERA: I don’t know. He thinks fourth grade, but I don’t know. There was a fire in this building in the ‘50s. And there was another floor to the building. I mean, it was a different kind of building; I think it was originally built in 1898. But yeah, when he came to visit me for the first time, he didn’t know that I rented in this specific spot, and in the parking lot declared, “I went here! I went to school here!” and so that’s a wild thing. But the fact is Buffalo small, and my father is from this area in Buffalo, Tonawanda, and his childhood home is about two blocks from here.

HORN: Okay. So on the subject of your dad, before he had a long career as a science teacher, he worked as a geologist for New York State. And I think part of his job as a geologist was to use photography to document structural rock formations and so forth, whatever it was that he was studying. But he took lots of pictures too, avocationally, out hiking—your dad is a lover of nature, as are you—and of course, of you and your sister when you were kids. Was it for you as a kid seeing and enjoying the pictures and slides that he took—do you think that’s what kindled your original interest in photography, or where did it come from?

OPERA: To answer the question did I enjoy looking at my dad’s photographs? Not really, because I remember as a kid—this would have been the early 1980s, when slideshows were really popular and my parents would like—

HORN: Force other people to watch their vacation slides—

OPERA: Right, and I’m like, oh my God. And I remember not really caring much about it, but I think, eventually, obviously—I have other things to say about my dad’s photographs and my development—but I do think like one thing my dad always instilled or, something that I learned by watching him, was this kind of obsessive relationship with empiricism, with observing the world. I was thinking about this this morning because my sister and I used to have a joke: we’d be driving with my dad and he would just, you know, blurt out “A hawk!” and you know, I think in those days [hawks] weren’t as commonplace in this area, but my dad was always doing things like that.

HORN: And so he’d see a hawk flying by outside, and—

OPERA: Yeah, but he was just hyper-aware of his environment. And then, you know, I mean, we would be then hiking a week later and there’d be pellets that he would identify as belonging to a hawk. So I think all these things he was observing—that I was observing him observing—added up to some kind of holistic whole. I think my dad has a kind of sensitivity to nature and ecosystems and that has to do, of course, with his education. But I think I developed a sense for that kind of thing long before I got into photographs. But as far as his relationship to photography, I think at a certain point, I was like, “Wait a minute. What’s he doing there? I want to do that too.” The first time I remember I got to use my dad’s really good camera, his Praktica which was an East German camera [fact-checked—Ed.] with a Zeiss lens. Kind of like the Volvo 240 of cameras. I mean, I was maybe 12. So yeah, and I mean, I think one of the other things— I’ve talked about this before is I really do think that when it comes to the photographs I’ve made that are lens-based images, the landscape period, from, you know, now 15+ years ago, I think it was a complete reflection in a way of my dad’s sensibility in taking pictures, a very kind of clinical, deadpan, you know, empirical kind of way of taking a photograph. There was really no reason to do anything tricky or gimmicky with vantage point or depth of field. I mean, there was always the sense that the purpose was to photograph what was in front of you. And so I think, in a sense, my training or my early growth—there was this almost classical approach to photography. And I wouldn’t say, you know, “pedestrian” or “amateur.” I mean, I think my dad actually had a really good—I mean, I looked through his photographs—I organized his slides a couple of years ago and I was like, Wow! He’s a really good image maker.

HORN: It’s just interesting that you should say that part of what you recognize about it, looking at [your dad’s photography], was that it was pretty much straight-on because I think sometimes when I think of some of your landscapes or some of the photographs that you took when you would go out hiking or something and come back, it was as if I was there with you, and you were saying like, Hey, take a look at this! Like, isn’t this cool? Check it out!

OPERA: Well you were there for one of them—“Zoar.”

HORN: I was there for several. I was there for a number of trips where you were taking photographs, but it’s kind of cool to look at the image—it’s as if you were saying through the image, you know, like, Hey, check out this very cool thing to look at. And I—you know, it’s true for me—I may have walked right past it, you know? And so it’s somebody with your eye calling attention to it, but without a bunch of artifice.

OPERA: Yeah, I mean, I think another way you could put it as that it’s a kind of classical human vantage point, that it’s very much about human vision. You know, it’s not on the ground and it’s not a caterpillar’s vision, but the camera was more or less 60 inches or so above the ground. And that, in a way, mimics human sight, which is something that is ultimately behind the very structure of photography, or what we know photography to be.

[21:05]

HORN: There are different ways that people categorize your work. We talked about landscapes, for example, I mean, things that you were into in a different period. And you could talk about it as the method of production; for example, anthotypes, where you’re using pigments and dyes from, you know, fruits and tea, I guess—natural pigments to produce the images. One of the ways that I think about it when I look at the different kinds of photographs that you have made is that there is a category of photograph that, you know, maybe somebody else with a really good eye and a good camera who had exceptional painstaking attention to detail—maybe somebody else could make that image. But now, you know, with some of the things that you are doing either with processes that are just so antique that very few people use them—anthotypes, I think, would be an example. It’s a very 19th-century process that probably wasn’t very popular at the time. And some of the work that you’re doing now with lasers, you know, where you build your own apparatus and an armature to be able to support and render these images. So the second category would be: some of the things you do, I don’t think anybody else could do!

OPERA: Large aspects of photography—most of photography—is very duplicatable, in the sense that if you, you know, have the same camera, the same lens, and maybe go stand in the same place around the same time of year at the same time of day and wait around long enough for atmospheric variables or whatever, you know, then you could more or less make something that resembles someone else’s style. And this is one of the paradoxes or limitations or deceptions—complexities, there a lot of ways you can describe this condition— Programmatic. This is a word that I use quite a bit, that most of photography has evolved and has been homogenized into pretty programmatic media. And that very much has to do with, I think, photography’s goal all along to get really closer and closer to human vision. And in some ways it’s surpassed human vision. I mean, it’s become hyper-real. Think of a photograph made by a satellite, you know, but that, I think, that is related to what you’re saying, this repetition that’s inherent in the medium. Basically, I think there was a motivation for me to remove myself from that structure, that system, and maybe that’s partially my ego, in the sense that I want to make something that is not really around, or that feels new. I want to make something that feels surprising to me even, and as I’ve evolved over the years, I think I’ve been inching closer and closer to basically reconfiguring photography as I see fit in terms of the apparatus, and photography is so linked and intertwined, entangled with apparatus. The way an apparatus is configured has a profound impact or effect on how it frames the world. So when we look through a telescope, there’s a certain set of data we can visually acquire. We can see the stars, we can see planets, we can see the rings of Saturn. At a certain point in my development, I found it necessary to design my own tools in order to discover new possibilities in terms of what a photograph can do or what it can say. And I think for a long time, I got really just tired of, or bored with, the more kind of programmatic approach. And I think there’s always been something about my work that has felt to be about photography itself; even the landscape works are about this relationship to empiricism and observation. But at a certain point I really wanted to invent and I wanted to expand. And I think a lot of those landscape images—I had such rich interior feelings that were associated with why I made those images and what was going on. They were of course images of a landscape, but there were other things kind of churning in me in terms of maybe an interior topography, and it never felt quite expressed in those photographs. And I think I was just kind of hungry to discover something, but it was also, I think, this desire to get to the source or to the more elemental qualities of photography. A lot of my work, when I start doing it, or when I start doing something new, you know, I really don’t think; I just do. I think, now in retrospect, I can understand this, but it goes back to this relationship between the apparatus and the outcome. And so I think I was just kind of remixing photography, including, you know, paying tribute to its history, to its evolution. When I do reach for an antiquated process, whether it’s an anthotype, or now the cyanotype canvases, it’s really important to me that the expression feels contemporary. You know, that it’s not quaint, or twee, or—what would be a good name? Nostalgic—even though it is nostalgic, but I think that’s just a symptom of our time. But again, I wanted to do something new.

[28:29]

HORN: Well, you know when I was reading this Sontag collection of essays about photography, like Here, this is it! This is part of what John does. It’s something I’ve gotten used to because I’ve been fortunate to be kind of alongside you and hearing about your discoveries and movements and inventions of various apparatus as you’ve done it. But this is part of what is so different. She writes, for example, at one point—and I think she’s trying to draw this distinction between, you know, what photography does and what painting does, right? But she has this moment where she says, “the identification of a subject of a photograph of the subject of a photograph” and I’m thinking of like a portrait or something perhaps—“always dominates our perception of it—as it does not, necessarily, in a painting. […] The formal qualities of style […] are, at most, of secondary importance of photography, while what a photograph is of is always of primary importance. The assumption underlying all uses of photography, that each photograph is a piece of the world, means that we don’t know how to react to a photograph if the image is visually ambiguous: say, too closely seen or too distant, until we know what piece of the world that it is. What looks like a bare coronet—the famous photograph taken by Harold Edgerton in 1936—becomes far more interesting when we find out it’s a splash of milk” [pp. 92-93, emphasis added]. So like, this was the moment where I was like, this is what John does. These are photographs where there are photographic processes, but we don’t necessarily know—I don’t necessarily know when I first look at one to say like, Oh well, that’s clearly a detail from this or that, or That might be this or that. You’re making abstractions [in much of your recent work], you’re painting with light, essentially. So I think while what she said here in the 1970s is probably true for most images created by photographic processes—probably—it doesn’t seem to apply to what you do, or at least what you’re doing right now. You know what I’m saying? So I think that’s part of what’s so interesting, but it’s also a little bit disorienting for a viewer of some of your pieces to say, like, Huh, what is happening here? It’s a very different experience from looking at, you know, say, a standard photograph.

OPERA: Yeah. I mean, I think what Sontag that passage is basically saying is that the subject is primary. The thing depicted is really what is pushed forward in a photograph. I mean, Rosalind Krauss would have referred to “the transparency of the medium.” We tend to just look right past the materiality of a photograph into the space where the subject resides, or the representation of the subject resides—

HORN: I’m sorry. Materiality. So that’s like the material, like what it’s actually printed on, the process that it takes to get it there, all that stuff?

OPERA: The piece of paper … yep. Right.

HORN: We just go right to What’s this of? Okay.

OPERA: Yes. And in the case of abstraction, I mean, I think what’s happened in my work over time is that I maintain these basic photographic ingredients—something light-sensitive, a substrate. But it’s kind of like any system—pick any system that comprises many elements and you start removing elements one by one, and, you know, when does it stop being that system? That’s kind of what I’ve done with photography is that I removed the lens, I removed the relationship between material and device, and I think with this work I’m really trying to find that line between what defines a photograph and when does it maybe push out into other kinds of experiences. For me, that’s I think the big metaphor in the work is this possibility of expanded vision. Not necessarily achieving it, but, you know, somehow pointing in that direction.

[33:29]

[VO]: Because you’re still listening, I’m gonna guess you are part of my target audience, which is smart people curious about what and how and why we learn. Today we’re mapping some of the terrain John Opera has taken as he has learned and relearned the art of photography through invention, imagination, and lots and lots of trial and error. If you are currently a financial supporter of Point of Learning, thanks so much! I’ll get back to highlights of my conversation with John in just a second. If you are not yet, please check out the show page or visit patreon.com/pointoflearningpodcast to find out how you can support this passion project of mine for as little as 10 cents a day. To keep it real, while I do pledge to two public radio stations and support a few podcasts I love with monthly donations, I don’t support every single one. But also, I don’t know of another solo-produced podcast that makes high-quality episodes that I still learn from when I listen to them years after they dropped! Your dollars help me pay for transcripts for each episode, batteries for recording equipment, stipends for musician and designer friends, and gas money, for example, for the road trip to Philly I’m taking next month to record my next interview—more about that at the end of the show. Thanks for your consideration. Back to John!

[34:58]

HORN: I have a friend who is a talented woodworker and furniture maker, and he talks about taking inspiration for the lines of some of the pieces that he makes, the form of them, from the architecture of bridges. Is there anything that you go back to—I know you’re a lover of nature, and you go hiking frequently and so forth and you look at the stars sometimes … but is there anything in either the natural or built/made world that is a continual source of inspiration for you, or does it shift?

OPERA: I laugh because I’m thinking. As you know, I’m a creature of habit. And I think—I don’t know—my routine is really important to me. I mean, it’s changed. I think you know I return to certain songs—certain music, you know—are always present when I’m making work. I mean, a friend of mine, Phil Vanderhyden, who you know—we have the same thing we do, which is we can both listen to a song on repeat like a hundred times in a day in the studio. And, you know, that kind of puts you into a trance-like situation. I don’t think Phil does it much anymore because I think he was doing it when he was painting.

HORN: Would that be like a Brian Eno Music for Airports type of thing?

OPERA: Yeah, Brian Eno, or it could be a Guided By Voices song, or yeah …

HORN: So it could have lyrics in it, but obviously at the hundredth time, you’re not listening

to lyrics.

OPERA: It’s like an energy field. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, Brian Eno’s Discreet Music has been in the background of me making these works for the last six years. I mean, I will listen to it on repeat while I’m making the work and, you know, I mean, some of the radial works take two days to make—15 hours. And I’ll listen to it so much, for example, I’ll be driving home and I’ll still hear it. Like, you know, auditory hallucination. Nature is still this kind of comfort for me. I think I don’t do it as much as I should anymore, but yeah, I think when things are not going well in my life, or I don’t feel like they’re going well, I’ll often go for a hike or return to those kinds of spaces. But I think my process has become a lot more interior. And that’s because I’m not going out into the world to find images; I’m [now] generating them from within the medium. So actually, this room, my studio is a really important place for me at this point.

[38:21]

HORN: Leaving aside, your professional projects for a moment, you also maintain at least one very well trafficked Instagram account that is mostly snapshots of your environment. This would be the quick like iPhone-type snapshot, quirky, often hilarious, sometimes disturbing snapshots of what you might see from your window at home or walking around. Is it ever tough to turn off that impulse? And this is me speaking. As you know, for a couple of decades there, I was a professional English teacher, and I would often have difficulty reading something for pleasure, like picking up a copy of Harper’s or just a novel or something, and like turning off that part of my brain that says like, This would be a great passage to teach. I could teach this story, maybe this poem over here. You know, it was hard to kind of turn that off and just enjoy it for what it was. So I guess I wanted to ask, is it hard for you when you’re just walking around to try to unplug and not say like, Oh, wait, that would make a pretty good photograph, to turn off that part of your brain? Or is photographic seeing pretty much just always a part of how you look at the world.

OPERA: Yeah. That’s a good question. Yeah, the phone has become an interesting tool for me. Yeah, I mean, in the case of the Instagram account @grant_and_potomac, I think you’re referring to—

HORN: I didn’t know if we could use names!

OPERA: Yeah, I mean, that kind of developed very organically. And it really started with me coming to the realization that the neighborhood I lived in was incredibly diverse and just had some real characters in it. And I mean, I think for me that that account is really the way I kind of keep in touch with my source as a photographer, but also I think it’s a reflection of all of the things that I never quite could fit into my work, but swirled around in my head. So yeah, there are some images on that account that are funny, some that are downright disturbing, or too real. And the context of those kind of, you know, intermingling, creates a certain kind of vibe. I mean, I think that that Instagram thing fulfills that for me, but in terms of do I feel compelled, or do I need to make those pictures? Not really! But as far as going out into the woods, I never take my camera anymore. Or rarely, very rarely—not unless I have a specific thing I’m looking for, like, you know, I mentioned to you, I wanted to go back to Zoar [Valley in Gowanda, NY] to try to look for water diffraction. But I when I enter those spaces, I think I do still see things photographically, and I think to myself, Oh, that would be a nice—that would be a really beautiful picture. But then I guess it goes back to that repetition thing that I told you I was trying to avoid, when I left those earlier ways of making photographs … even though now I’m kind of inside of a different kind of repetition with the abstractions. But I think it’s folded back more onto, you know, empiricism, and still being sensitive to my surroundings. Well, it’s interesting. I notice everything. I really do. I mean, not everything—that sounds egotistical, but I notice minutia that I know a lot of people don’t, or at least that’s what I’ve been told.

HORN: Is there something in my teeth?

OPERA: No, no. You’re good.

[42:22]

HORN: Well, you talked about things in the @grant_and_potomac account, they’re very funny, you know, some funny images in there, and this is a point that I did think of as a question. You are one of the funniest people in my life.

OPERA: That’s true.

HORN: Maybe I should meet more people? When we talk on the phone, we can talk and crack each other up, and you know it’s a good thing. The very start of this interview, for example, I probably will use as an outtake at the very end [of the episode], because we couldn’t hold it together, but do you see humor in your work? Like, in your stuff that you show, is that in there? OPERA: Not much.

HORN: Yeah, I mean, has that ever been anything that you’ve thought about?

OPERA: No, I mean, you’re not the only person who has pointed this out. In many ways, my work, I think, comes from a much deeper place that I don’t show very often. And that goes along with a couple things that I think about a lot. One is that your surface attributes are what you externalize to the world. I never feel compelled to put that in my work. I think for me, my work has always been, in a way, very foreign to me. But also, it comes from a very deep place. And I often say this to people, and I really believe it: I follow the work. There are things that I know I need to do in the work, in order to get to the next level of understanding, for example.

And I don’t know, I’ve always had that tendency—I mean, even as a child, I would take things apart in the house. And I don’t know if you remember when I used to make models. This is before I knew you, but when I was like seven or eight, I mean, when I look at them, they’re kind of disturbing because they’re very well detailed. So I mean, they’re not disturbing, but they’re surprising. And I don’t know, I think that’s always—you know, people have a lot of contradictions, and I’m a person, just like you are. And I don’t know. I mean, there are parts of my work that I don’t feel like want to explain it, or I don’t necessarily want to understand it completely, you know, because I think there’s always been something about what I do—I know to proceed in my work when something really surprises me, something that kind of comes out of the ether, if you will. I mean, maybe something that really wasn’t part of my conscious decision-making, but it just kind of appeared, if that makes sense. It sounds really out there, but—

HORN: It does. It makes sense. It resonates. And I think that that’s probably a good point, that you don’t need to. You know, there are plenty of people making whimsical art, photographs or other art that’s a little bit like tongue-in-cheek, or so forth, and if that’s not what you want, you know, if that’s not what you feel called to make, if that’s not what you follow, that makes sense. It’s just, you know, it’s interesting, and it’s something that I had never focused on. And then I had this thought as I was prepping for the interview, and I was like, Wait, what if I’ve gotten it wrong and there is something that John thinks is funny, but I’ve just missed it because maybe my sense of humor isn’t very good!

OPERA: I mean, I think it’s funny that I’m willing to spend 15 hours making something only to have it not turn out. I mean, that happens a lot, and that’s a moment where I’m like, I could either cry or laugh and, you know—

HORN: [Deadpan] That’s hilarious!

OPERA: —it’s usually somewhere in the middle. But I’ve never really felt compelled to reveal myself too much to the viewer because I don’t think that’s why I make the work. And that’s not what the work is about. I think of myself as being really present, and kind of reconfiguring things in a process, for example, to see what I can discover, and it always has to be about perception. I mean, we’re ultimately talking about visual reality here, and visual language. So I think I’m just always looking for that surprise.

[47:34]

[VO]:John has taught for nearly 20 years, mostly at the college and university level, but also some precocious high school kids. I asked him about the kinds of things he asks them to think about as he prompts them to think about images more critically.

OPERA: I think what I try to do with students is start talking about cliché as soon as possible. You know, photography is a funny medium. I mean, again, going back to this idea of repetition and ubiquity and embeddedness in the world, I often say this to students, I say, “You know, I’m sure, if this is your first photography course, maybe you’re taking this because you saw a photograph at some point and you wanted to learn how to make that photograph, or make a photograph very similar to that photograph.” And that’s something that is just intuitively, automatically a part of it. So I think you really have to resolve that, and identify it in process and deal with that before you can really start to do things that feel like more personal expressions.

And you know, in the beginning, I take a very kind of intuitive, organic approach. I don’t really talk to students about what to photograph, but I do talk about what not to photograph. With a student who first picks up a camera, you can almost predict what the roll of film, or the 70 images might include: a picture of their feet, a stop sign, a fire hydrant, their dogs …

HORN: A sunset?

OPERA: A sunset. Yes, absolutely. So I want students to kind of discover what’s that thing that’s important to them. I think they really need to do that on their own. And in the beginning with a beginning student, you know, it’s very much about just learning the mechanics, like learning the violin, learning an instrument, being intuitive with it. I think in learning about the camera, you kind of have to learn it as an instrument, and there are stages or steps of development that I think every student of photography has to go through. And I think, you know, those cliché moments are actually really important, because they create discussion and dialogue.

HORN: I remember our talking about this—I don’t know, 10 or 15 years ago. I think it was shortly after you began to teach, and we’re talking about, you know, clichés and so forth. And I was like, Yeah, you know, I’ve seen a fair number of photographs and so forth, but don’t you have to have a certain amount of experience, in any kind of conversation that you enter, to know where the conversation has been? So if you’re talking about the conversation of images, like how would I, as a 13-year-old, or even a 17-year-old, know that everybody’s photographed their feet before, for example? Like you wouldn’t, necessarily. Or maybe it’s that question, as you said, like, Think about the photograph that you saw that maybe made you want to figure out how to make it. It seems easier to do with a certain amount of experience, but harder to do with less experience, to know [what has been done before].

OPERA: Well, I mean, I think it’s like levels of understanding, levels to the conversation. And again, I think it’s important that students go through those levels, but, you know, as someone who’s hyper-committed to the medium, I also want to kind of push them along. So they get to that point where it’s not about repeating what you see. I often say this, that photography is a medium about recollection and repetition; it’s not a medium where you generate new things typically, which is maybe why I really want to—

HORN: Bust that wide open!

OPERA: Why I do that. Yeah, I do that. Now I do that. But in a traditional way, or maybe in a more elemental way, you know, as someone’s learning about images, that’s the trap. But it’s also what’s interesting about the medium, and it’s interesting because of the way it reflects back onto human behavior. You know, where repetition and repeating, that’s really about belonging and understanding, or supposedly understanding. I mean, we could talk about how images influence culture. I mean, that’s a for another podcast, but you know, these things are such powerful mirrors. And I think, I know, as an educator, this is the thing I want students to understand, whether they want to work within that program, or however they approach the medium. It’s really important to me that they think about it, not so much skeptically or cynically, and I’ve had students tell me that—

HORN: Well, skepticism’s great. Cynicism, not so much!

OPERA: Yeah, but really for me, I would describe it as self-consciousness, that your decisions, I hope, eventually are made because you understand, or at least you have a better understanding of why you’re doing what you’re doing with the camera.

HORN: Yeah. I imagine it’s like a beginning songwriting student really loving something they wrote and then realizing it’s like Beatles or Bob Marley or something, and they are like, Whoa, I like this phrase because I’ve heard it many times!  

OPERA: A-E-D, A-E-D [chord progression]. Buddy Holly! Totally.

[53:51]

[VO]: At the end of our two-hour conversation, I asked John to describe what to me, as an educator, is one of John’s most poignant current projects, an ongoing series of dozens and dozens of portraits of his own students using the 19th-century anthotype process, which, as we’ve said, relies for color on dyes and pigments from plants that are inherently unstable; that is, they will necessarily fade over time.

OPERA: I returned to the anthotypes because I was really, I think, rethinking, re-evaluating what it meant for an image to fade. And of course, all of these associations with memory and experience and people and life, you know, start to come into play. And I wanted to make photographs again. I wanted to make images of something that I felt invested in and that I was in close proximity to. And this is another thing I’ll often talk to students about is that, you know, the goal is not to take an ordinary photograph of an extraordinary subject. Anyone can go to Niagara Falls and take a halfway decent photograph. It’s really about going to the ordinary, or approaching things that we might feel are banal, and trying to transform or transcend what they typically stand for, what they’re typically about …So I just started photographing my students. I mean, I have very close relationships with some of my students in the classroom, and teaching is a really big part of my identity at this point. So I thought it was interesting, and I don’t talk about that body of work very much, and I really haven’t exhibited it because my plan is, you know, I kind of want to get to like a 100 or 150 [student anthotype potraits]. I want to have a lot before I have a show.

HORN: But then you are exposing these, right, in a greenhouse?

OPERA: Right. Yes.

HORN: On campus [at the University at Buffalo].

OPERA: Yeah. Right. Right now, currently.

HORN: And then you just check on them periodically.

OPERA: I do. Yeah. A person in the biology department has allowed me to use the greenhouse, and one of my colleagues kind of helped facilitate that, who works in the bio art lab at UB. So I’ve been really lucky to just be able to do these things year-round without worrying about weather and things like that.

HORN: And so you bring them in and scan them at various intervals. Is that what you’re doing?

OPERA: No, no. I mean, right here on the table, we have the raw prints. And I have exhibited them. I exhibited 12 of them and there I put the actual objects, the actual prints into the frames. And their kind of fugitive nature [i.e., apt to fade] is part of it for me. And I think I recently said to someone or in a talk that strangely enough, it’s kind of comforting that things change, you know? And I don’t know, I think, you know, of the fact that probably by the time the image will fade, the person that I photographed is going to be a very different person. They’re like anything else in the world; they don’t last forever. So yeah, again, this is following the work, that body of work. I don’t know when it will be exhibited honestly, but every year I just keep doing it. And it’s also a way to open up a conversation about photography with my students. I mean, it really is a teaching aid in a way. I can talk about more metaphysical things about light and photography’s relationship to the natural world. So that is also a part of, I think, one of the ways in which I try to get students engaged in thinking about the medium in a different way than maybe how they were thinking when they walked in the classroom.

HORN: I think there’s something very poignant and beautiful about it. I always remember hearing you describe it and then seeing the images for the first time, because I think for any teacher, it’s going to suggest, you know, the connections, the relationships that you have with individual students, but then also to recognize that these things fade and change over time, you know, the influence that one has on one’s students, but also that they have on you—but that, you know, it fades and changes.

OPERA: Yeah. I mean, I also think there’s something interesting—like images don’t have to be attached to objects, too. There’s something about the life of an image that lives off of the object, in a more interior space. I mean, you know, either one of us could probably in our mind right now recall an image that’s not in front of us. Maybe it’s a photograph, maybe it’s a person in your life, it’s whatever, but there’s something about [these images] being turned over to the ether that I think says something, you know. I’m not exactly sure. I mean, I’ll go along with Susan Sontag’s [1966 collection of essays] Against Interpretation right now. I don’t think everything needs to be explained.

[VO]: That’s it for today’s show! My great thanks to John Opera for joining me, not to mention for his friendship since 1985. Thanks to you for listening to, sharing, rating, and reviewing Point of Learning. Thanks as always to Shayfer James for intro and outro music, and special thanks this time to violinist Thomas Halpin—my former teacher, and star of Point of Learning episode 009, if you’re inclined to visit or revisit that show from three years ago—for permission to use his recording of Philip Glass’s composition “Einstein on the Beach” as featured music for this episode. This recording comes from a live performance attended by Philip Glass himself, who called it the most “elegant” rendition of the piece he had heard. A member of the Lyceum consortium of education podcasts, Point of Learning is written, recorded, edited, and mixed by me here in Sunny Buffalo, New York. I’m Peter Horn, and I’ll be back at you next month with radio visionary Bill Siemering, who wrote the founding purposes of National Public Radio in 1970, and then helped to create All Things Considered and Fresh Air. See you then!  

REPORT FROM CENTRAL ASIA Transcript (034)

PAULA ALIDA ROY [bumper]: Hello, this is Paula Alida Roy, educator and poet, and you are at the Point of Learning with my friend Peter Horn. I hired Peter to teach English at Westfield High School in New Jersey in 1997. A few months later, Duane Lacey became my student in AP English Literature and Composition. I’m so proud of Duane, now a poet and professor of philosophy at the American University of Central Asia in Kyrgyzstan. Although I will be interested to hear what Peter and Duane discuss, I am also eager to hear from Peter’s other guest, Faryal, a young Afghan woman, a graduate student who was born under Taliban rule, and now faces a return to it.

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today’s show, Duane Lacey, a philosophy professor who has taught in Muslim-majority countries since 2008 …

DUANE LACEY: For myself, I needed to see up close, firsthand, and personal. I needed to understand what an Islamic culture really meant. I needed to hear the call to prayer, not in a movie, but outside my window.

[VO]: We discuss what drew him to philosophy and poetry, and his experience in the United Arab Emirates and Kyrgyzstan.

DUANE: One thing is the value of the guest, right? The value of the stranger. Deep-seated in a lot of the cultures that I’ve had the opportunity and fortune to experience. And it is this idea that oh, you’re a guest here! Which means we have to give you food, we have to be nice! Like, compare that to New York. It’s very different!

[VO]: I also speak with Faryal Haidary, who is intently following news from her home country of Afghanistan ...

FARYAL HAIDARY: I wake up every day looking at my social media. I’m looking all those women in the street protesting and thinking if I was in Afghanistan, I would have done the same thing.

[VO]: Having earned Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees, Faryal was planning to return home, but now she cannot.

FARYAL: It’s not an easy journey for any Afghan woman to go to school. From the beginning, like from going to school to university. And now they’re jobless. They cannot work. They cannot do anything. So what was all that education for? It was for nothing.

[03:18]

[VO]: All that, and much more on today’s special show, “Report from Central Asia.” Duane Lacey is a professor of philosophy at the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. With interests ranging from Ancient Greek philosophy and mathematics to the philosophy of science, Duane’s first college appointment was at St. John’s College in Maryland, but he quickly set his sights east, working for a time in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia before serving as a professor at the United Arab Emirates University in Abu Dhabi for five years. Since 2013 he has taught philosophy at the American University of Central Asia, about 650 miles from Kabul, Afghanistan. I note this because, after Kyrgyz students, Afghan students comprise the next largest demographic group at AUCA, and when the chaotic US withdrawal began in August, Duane became the unofficial liaison between AUCA and the Afghan students whose safety was suddenly compromised. Although this work kept him on edge and underslept for weeks, he not only agreed to Zoom with me in late August, but also introduced me to a former student of his, Faryal Haidary, highlights from whose interview make up the second two-thirds of this special episode. Although Duane was never my student, he was a high school senior during my first year of teaching, and I recall fondly many hours of conversation with him in the English Resource Center, where I was on duty 8th period every day. I’m pretty sure he had no scheduled classes then, but looking back, I don’t know! I do know that Duane Lacey was one of the most brilliant students I met in my nearly two decades at Westfield High School, and it has been a profound experience to reconnect with him recently. Facebook, you’re still good for something! While we were catching up last month, Duane said that philosophy and poetry saved his life in high school. Early in his remarks he pays tribute to a kind, smart, and influential English teacher named Kate Strauss.

DUANE: So for me, poetry was first, and it was mainly because I had, you know, the wonderful Kate Strauss. We had a writing assignment. I wrote this poem, and it’s just the way she reacted to it kind of caught me off-guard. She was encouraging! You know, Westfield—I was lucky. All of the circumstances of why I moved when I was 15, from New Hampshire with my parents to Westfield, New Jersey—all of those reasons are horrible. It was a terrible moment in my family’s life, but I was lucky to end up in Westfield. The teachers I was used to in Manchester, New Hampshire might hit you if you made them angry. [Peter laughs.] I’m not joking! You know, like they certainly weren’t polite, and “encouraging” was like not in their vocabulary. So anyway, so I started getting into poetry, but I remember the only reason I got into it because was because someone said, “Hey, this was really good!” And I was like, “Teachers do this? Teachers actually say, ‘good job’?” Anyway, so I go to this used book store, I’m just looking at the poetry books, and then I sort of wandered into a small philosophy section. I guess I was around 15 years old, 16 maybe. And on the bookshelf was this book called What Is a Thing? by Martin Heidegger. And I looked at the title and I just thought it was the dumbest title ever. I was like, How could you have a whole book called … I was looking at it like, come on! WHAT IS A THING? Really? And it’s a whole book! So I bought it. I had to. So I took it home, five bucks, you know, and it’s not really advisable on your first foray into philosophy. You know, [German-Swiss psychiatrist] Karl Jaspers said Heidegger is a dangerous thinker because he will hypnotize you. So maybe it was just by chance that the first real philosophy book that I picked up was a hypnotic set of lectures by Martin Heidegger. But basically, I picked up the book and I’m like, All right, what is a thing? I mean, come on, you know? And then I start reading it and he’s talking about a piece of chalk. And he’s like, “What is this piece of chalk? When I break the chalk in half, where is the essence of the chalk?” I’m like, Holy … What is chalk? Wait, what is a thing? And I read the book. Couldn’t understand it. I mean, I didn't have the background to understand it. There are whole chapters on like Immanuel Kant and the “categorical imperative” and all this stuff that I had not studied. So it’s like, I know these words and I know the sentences are grammatically correct. Why don’t I understand, you know?

PETER: Part of what’s interesting about this story is it reminds me of nothing so much as a good friend of mine who was a kind of mentor figure to me when I was in high school. He’s somebody who would, you know, refer to elements of Ugaritic or Farsi. And you would ask him a question like “How many languages do you speak?” And he would say like, “One at a time!” So I was like, “Well, how did you get on this road?” I remember asking him as a freshman or something in high school. And he said, “I was at a parade even when I was eight or nine years old. And there was a group of Jews from our neighborhood who came marching, and they had a sign, they had a banner in Hebrew, and I couldn’t understand what the banner said. I wanted to know what the banner said. And so as soon as I could, I started teaching myself Hebrew”—or he did it with an elder in the neighborhood, I don’t know, but it was that challenge to him: Here’s something that I want access to, you know. I feel like it could be available, but it’s not available yet, [and] it’s tempting, and I want in! And that launched him on this whole thing. So whether Heidegger is the first philosopher one should encounter or not in a given curriculum such as you might design now, it’s interesting to think, it felt like a challenge.

DUANE: Yeah, and I guess, you know, the advantage I had was I was so ignorant of all of it that I didn’t realize how difficult it was. I was just like, “Okay.” So it was like little moments of Oh, I get this idea! And somewhere in there, I remember—like anyone who’s read anybody theoretical will have had this kind of moment where you’re reading something and you think like, Oh wait, I’ve had this idea! but I just didn’t say it as clearly as this person is now saying it, so now it was just like candy to a baby for me. I couldn’t get enough, you know? But the other thing with the poetry connection—and I do still tell my students this to this day: Poetry and philosophy, I believe, should both be read very slowly, working in good faith on the idea that there’s nothing on the page that’s not there for a good reason. If you get to a sentence or a statement and you don't know why it’s there, then slow down and stop and try to figure out why it’s there before you just keep going. So I’ll tell my students, “Look, I’m assigning you 50 pages to read by next Tuesday. But if you can get through two pages really well, that’s better than reading all 50 and not knowing what just happened.” And I think poetry is the same way.

[14:04]

[VO]: Before he was Professor Lacey, Duane was an undergraduate in September 2001, studying at the New School in New York City. There he witnessed firsthand the attack on the World Trade Center. Because it had a deep influence on his eventual decision to teach in the Middle East and Central Asia, I asked him what he'd be willing to document about his experience of 9/11. I've edited it, but this segment still features some graphic detail, so I will say that it lasts about 11 minutes, if you're not in a place to hear it right now and would like to skip ahead. Duane was at this time working a  range of odd jobs to pay for school and living expenses.

DUANE: Technically I had no business being in the vicinity of the World Trade Center. I was an undergraduate at the New School. I’m not going to say I was homeless, but I was sleeping in an elevator at one of the university dormitories called the Marlton House, which is on 8th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. The guy at the Marlton House, he’s like, “Okay, so you can spend the night in the elevator and then at around 6:00 AM or so, go downtown.” There are, I don’t know, four or five buildings. He’s like, “I have an agreement with the owners. You just need to sweep all the steps in the building and clean the elevators.” I mean, basically custodial work. And that’s what I was doing when the first plane hit. I didn’t see the first plane. I was in the basement. I don’t really remember the exact location, because we were working on different buildings. I guess I want to say Warren Street, which is about four blocks away from the Trade Center. So I remember I was in the basement and all of a sudden there was just this boom! The ground shook, the noise was intense. And I, in my brain, I was like a bomb just went off. You know, that was the first instinct or whatever. So I ran up the steps of the building and went outside and, you know, you could see the Trade Center. There was this fiery hole and I guess, you know, it’s very difficult when you deal with like perspective and proportion. The Trade Center is tall and far away, you know, so that hole looked kind of minor, relative to the whole building. But you know, actually, to even see it at all, it must be a massive hole, right? With flames and smoke. And so there were two guys who only spoke Spanish. They were doing scaffolding on the building that I was working in, and said “Plane! Plane!” And you know, I’m kind of freaked out. A plane just hit the Trade Center? We didn’t know, at that moment we didn’t know what kind of plane—maybe it was just someone, you know. We didn’t know it was a massive commercial plane, you know, American Airlines. We didn’t know.

[VO]: Duane was working with a man several decades his senior named Roland.

DUANE: And then Roland casually looks at me. We’re looking up at this gaping horror in the first tower, and he just looks at me. He’s like, “You want to go get some breakfast?” So Roland’s idea was like, This would be a good time to get a cup of coffee and an egg sandwich! So I walked with Roland actually kind of closer, I guess, and then he’s inside ordering us our breakfast. And that’s when the second plane came. And that was for me, that’s the life changer. It came over my head. The speed, the noise—the speed of that plane was—obviously I’ve seen the footage that we’ve all seen of that second plane—because nobody was watching, so we don’t really have much footage of first plane, whereas we’ve got all the footage of the second plane hitting, you know. I guess the camera, because of the camera angles or whatever, and it’s so far away, it looks slow. You know, when we see the news footage of the second plane, it looks kind of slow. It was not slow. I mean, you know, imagine a a commercial airliner basically at full tilt, flying so close to the ground at, you know, hundreds of miles per hour, it’s just the speed was intense. And then smash! It hits, and immediately everyone on the sidewalk where I was just ran away, just ran away, dropping, you know, dropping DiscMans, tripping over baby strollers. And I’m not an engineer, or anything close, but I do remember just that plane over my head, the proximity of it, the speed of it, the sound of it—it shook the ground and the impact, my immediate thought was that building is going to fall down. That’s what I thought. There’s no way it could not fall. So whether or not there were, you know, other things going on, I don’t know. But I’m just saying as a bystander, my thought was, there’s no way anything survived that kind of impact. It was just that intense. And I mean, I guess for all of us, that was the moment when we were like, Oh, wait, a second plane? Number one was no accident. This is now a completely different narrative. So Roland comes out. He’s got our coffees. And I’m like, “Dude, what do we do?” But he was, you know, it’s such a classic, like New York thing. So I said to Roland, I was like, “Should we get back on the subway?” He’s like, “No. We gotta walk.” So the Marlton House is on Eighth street. So it’s a pretty long walk to get back to the Marlton House. But he said, “I worked on the—” That’s why, I mean, ‘typical New York,’ you know? He’s like, “I worked on the steel for that building,” and he said, “and it’s riddled with gas bubbles. It’s going to burn and burn. And it’s probably going to fall down and we don't want to be on that subway line.” So Roland maybe saved my life, because I probably would have gotten on the subway and gotten trapped. But he’s like, “Let’s just walk.” So we walked back. It took us I don’t know how long—

PETER: [incredulous] The guy you were with had worked on the construction of the Towers? DUANE: Yeah. Yeah! He was that old. So then I got to a payphone. I tried to call my parents to let them know I was okay. But you couldn’t dial out of the city at that point. And I didn’t own a cell phone, but anyway it wouldn’t have worked. If I had stayed where I was when that collapse happened, I don’t— I definitely was in the radius. So you know, the sheer scale of it … I mean, you want to help. I was a little angry at the people who just ran away, but it’s not like I ran toward the building. And the sheer scale is like, I cannot do anything, you know? And the police and the ambulances and the fire trucks started rolling in and, you know, New York’s finest. I was just thinking like, man, I do not envy what they're about to try and deal with! I don’t know if the news footage covers this, but it was actually quite noticeable that, you know, after the planes hit, one of the things that was just coming, issuing, issuing out of the holes in the building was paper, just like just covering the sky, paper and pigeons, kind of switching up—all of this paperwork that needs no longer means anything. Right? And then amidst all of that, there are these other things coming out, and you didn’t realize it at first. And you’re like, Oh, those are people, you know? And what choice did they have? I mean, it’s either burn to death or jump, you know? And so, I didn’t help anyone. I didn’t run, but I didn’t help anyone. I slowly made my way toward safety. And then I thought, what can I do?

[25:50]

DUANE: But then yeah, 9/11 then all of a sudden, it’s like, What’s the Taliban? Who’s Osama bin Laden? What’s Islam? Like, to me, Islam was just another religion, you know, I didn’t care. It wasn’t significant. So now I guess me, like so many people my age and otherwise, it was like we were shocked into all of a sudden feeling like we should know about the rest of the world, maybe.

PETER: Yeah, because this is the thing. Again, you lived all these years, and of course we just got back in touch recently, but if you excise two decades from this story, you go from living through 9/11/01 to being twenty years later in a 90% Muslim-demographic country. That’s where you’ve been working now for the past—what, eight years? is that right?

DUANE: Yeah. I’ve been in Kyrgyzstan just about eight, seven or eight years. I was in the UAE for about five years. Yes.

PETER: I mean, that’s fascinating!

DUANE: Gnawing at me was maybe you should—this is me talking to myself—maybe I should not just be, you know, some professor working on obscure shit, trying to pump out papers, like maybe I should try and do a little bit more. So that’s when I thought, All right, well, I’m getting a PhD. I hadn’t finished yet, but that’s when I started thinking like, Maybe I’ll go into the military, maybe I’ll go work for a government agency. Maybe I should do that. Maybe I could put my analytic logic and theory skills into a practical application. For myself, I needed to see up close, firsthand, up and personal. I needed to understand what Islamic culture really meant. I needed to hear the call to prayer, not in a movie, but outside my window. I needed to know. Because I knew all the sentiments. I knew how angry I was at Islam. I knew how angry other people were Islam, and then invading Iraq, that whole … George Bush, you know, all of that that we would do. I was like, Okay, I’m not a fan of Islam. I’m not a fan of any religion, period, but I just felt like I cannot. I cannot criticize that which I do not really understand, you know, no matter how easy it is and in the environment that we were living in post-9/11, it’s easy to criticize Islam, easy as can be! No one’s going to get upset. You’re going to get all the support you want. So I went to the Middle East. Now I’ve learned what an Islamic culture is, but at least now I can be critical with some firsthand knowledge of what I’m actually talking about. You know, I’m not just making it up or listening to some talking head on some news channel or whatever.

PETER: And I know that obviously some of the fundamentalist aspects are really hard to contend with, especially when they affect the lives of these students that you have come to care about. But before we go there a little bit, is there something that you’ve come to appreciate as—I don’t know—valuable, admirable about Islam, Islamic culture, about the people that you have met in Islamic cultures? Because again, I don’t know how once you’re living in it, you can separate the people that you’re having daily life with, sharing daily life with, and then say, well, this is the “culture.” I don’t know. I mean, it seems like kind of a difficult exercise.

DUANE: Yeah, no, absolutely. For any of the people listening to this podcast, one of the things that I’ve come to realize—not just in Islamic cultures, but like in Georgia, for example, in the Republic of Georgia, which, what’s the predominant religion there? Well, it’s mostly Orthodox Christianity. One thing is the value of the guest, right? The value of the stranger. In the United States, you know, in America, we have that phrase “Southern hospitality.” It feels like that, but the deep-seated—and I guess it’s, you know, biblical, if not older—but deep-seated in a lot of the cultures that I’ve had the opportunity and fortune to experience is this hospitality, this idea that, Oh, you’re a guest here! Which means we have to give you food. We have to be nice to you. Like, compare that to New York! It’s very different! The friendliness to a complete stranger is something that surprised me time and time again. And I’m not saying on the other hand, Peter, that countries are not getting more nationalistic in a very frustrating, frightening way. I believe they are. The other thing I did want to say though, really quickly, just is that there’s a deep respect for books in the Islamic culture and not just like “Arabs,” or whatever people think when they think “Islamic culture,” but Southeast Asian Muslim … So, if there’s a book on the floor, you do not step over the book. It’s what we would call haram.

[VO]: Haram is an Arabic term, meaning “forbidden.”

DUANE: And if you’re carrying the Quran, it should be wrapped up. You shouldn’t touch it with unwashed hands. So it’s a little maybe excessive, but I liked that respect. And it’s not just the Quran. It’s any book.

[34:00]

[VO]: I asked Duane if there was any particular mission that drove his teaching of Western philosophy in predominantly Muslim countries.

DUANE: There was a period of time when I felt I had some kind of life-changing insights to—you know, I was coming into a conservative environment, you know, I’m going to shatter the glass, shatter all of it, just, you know, break it up.

PETER: That’s how I felt rolling into Westfield, New Jersey, baby! Yeah. That’s young teacher stuff.

DUANE: You know, that’s right, exactly! So, well, I guess right now at least, my feeling is I’m more familiar with what I know that I know. I guess it’s sort of a weird way of saying like the best thing I can do is be that teacher who gets excited at everything Socrates says, and you know, I know that sounds maybe corny or cheesy or whatever, but it’s like, I do think—and I’m sure you’ve had this experience, too—like when a teacher loves what he or she is teaching, that translates to the students, for the most part.

PETER: Sure.

DUANE: And so for me, it’s become more that I just need to be better at what I’m already supposedly better at, and I’m supposed to love what I already love. And I need to take care to, you know, to be aware of where I am and who I’m talking to. In that “care,” what I mean is to break down the differences, the cultural differences or whatever between us and create a classroom where, Hey, we’re all gonna have a headache by the end of this conversation because we’re just going to be like, “What is chalk?” I don’t know. But now I can tell you why I don’t know what chalk is. That’s the difference. Like asking the questions is one thing, but being able to explain why you don’t know the answer? Hey! Job done, lesson learned, headache acquired, go on about your day, go be a business major, but I just had you for an hour of philosophy and … you don’t know what chalk is! Yay! So like, I want that experience. And so I’m just trying to be better at that.

[VO]: I wanted to know about major differences between the two predominantly Muslim cultures Duane has worked in, the United Arab Emirates (or UAE)  and now Kyrgyzstan.

DUANE: When I moved here from the UAE, you know, in the UAE, the male students I taught on one campus and the female students I taught on a different campus. They are not integrated. So I went from five years of that and then I came here and one of the first things I see in the hallway of the university is two kids making out on a couch in the hallway. And I was like, Oh, thank God! This feels better to me. I think I mentioned too, when we were talking, you know, the guys in the UAE at least, you know, the guys there dressed like Bedouin guys and the girls are dressed like Bedouin women. Here, you know, it’s more like jeans and t-shirts and stuff like that. So that’s why I say that the religion is there, but it’s less predominant. And so when I’m teaching philosophy, either there or here, I guess, there’s always that moment—you know what I’m talking about, Peter—like the “aha moment,” you know, when the student is like, I don’t know why I’m here. Why am I talking about chalk? Or like, you know, in my math class, I’ll say something like, “Okay, can you all please imagine the number five?” And they’re like, Yeah. And I’m like, “Well, okay, have you ever seen the number five?” Yeah. And then I begin, like, “You’ve never seen the number five. You never will. You never have, but it’s real.” And then I go a little further. I say, “Everybody knows what a circle is, right?” Yeah. “Have you ever seen a circle?” They’re like, like, Yeah, yeah. I’ve seen a circle. And then I say, “No. You never have, and you never will. It’s a two-dimensional object, my friends. It’s a concept, and hence Plato,” and there we go! “All right. So what’s the ontological status of the number five?” And you know, at those moments, nobody cares whether Muhammad said this or Muhammad said that or, you know, Jesus said this or Moses said that, I mean, it’s like, What? I thought I knew what a circle was. Now you’re telling me I never saw one! Those are the moments I live for in teaching. And that shit happens no matter what culture, and you just, you know, they just give you a moment to ask that question. And I mean, ask anyone, “Have you seen a circle?” They say yes. And then you’re like, “No, you haven’t.” And then they’re like, Wait. That’s the world I live in.

[41:13]

[VO]: Faryal Haidary was born in Kabul, Afghanistan at the height of the Taliban’s initial rule between 1996-2001. She attended school through 12th grade in Afghanistan, after which she pursued her studies at the American University of Central Asia in Kyrgyzstan, where she earned a B.A. in Psychology and a Master’s degree in Sociology. AUCA is also where she met Duane as her professor for Introduction to Philosophy, and I am very grateful to him for introducing Faryal to me. She and I spoke the night of September 13th, Buffalo time, which was the morning of September 14th in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. On my end, a severe storm rolled in just as Faryal and I began to talk. I’ve done my best to suppress the thunderclaps, but you may detect some in the distance. I mention the date because things change so rapidly. Faryal refers several times to the courageous resistance being waged in Panjshir, one of the 34 provinces of Afghanistan. As of today it’s very hard to know what’s going on. In late August, as the battles were heating up, the Taliban disabled internet and mobile phone services in Panjshir, effectively cutting off the residents not only from the rest of the country and the world, but also from themselves.

PETER: So my first question is how are you this morning?

FARYAL: Well, I wake up every day with looking at my social media and looking at all those women in the street protesting, and thinking, If I was in Afghanistan, I would have done the same thing. But also looking at the women getting lashed and whipped by Taliban. And then seeing men around her, just looking at the scene and not doing anything—when it’s just one person, one Talib, like they could just get their gun and beat him, or do something because their population is more than Taliban, but no one is doing anything! And this is so heartbreaking. Just recently my friend texted me that our friend who graduated from the same university as I was abducted, and her whole family was abducted, because she graduated from an American university. And that was unbelievable. They’re still [jailed] by Taliban, and I don’t know for what reason. Their justification is maybe because she studied here in a westernized culture. I feel so sad that we are considered as the infidels now to Taliban because we went abroad. We struggled our way to get an education. We didn’t give up. We didn’t sit at home and do domestic house chores. We wanted to get financially independent and the only way to do that was to get education. And this is sad for all those women who are now educated. It’s not an easy journey for any Afghan women to go to school, from the beginning, from going to school to university. And then now they’re jobless. They cannot work. They cannot do anything. So like, what was all that education for, then? It was for nothing.

PETER: To go back to this question, when you say that it seemed like there’s one Talib in a given situation committing a horrible act, how is it that he could not be overpowered? I think this is one of the things that a lot of people wonder when they’re looking at this situation, to say, you know, Afghanistan had thousands of troops who seemed to well outnumber the Taliban’s forces. These troops had been trained by U.S. forces and other allies. They seem to be well-equipped. Some people wonder: how was it—you know, how do you think it was that the Taliban was able to take over so quickly? Of course they had been in control, you know, two decades ago for a period of six or seven years. But how was it that they were able to resurge so quickly? Was it purely fear of the Taliban, or was there something else at work?

FARYAL: I think it was the government itself. It was not well aware, and no one was expecting this, even the Afghan government and plus, they did not support all of those troops in other provinces. When it starts from other provinces, like, for example, Herat [in western Afghanistan]. We lost Herat in just a few days. And then people started to fight back and there were civilians involved. But we heard that the government did not help them at all while they asked for so much help, and the government did not respond to anything and they did not send any weapons. They fought all by themselves, like what’s happening right now in Panjshir. Are you aware of how the resistance group is fighting against Taliban in Panjshir?

PETER: I’m aware that they have been making a strong effort.

FARYAL: Yes, they are, and those weapons are not supported by the government at all. Unfortunately. Like maybe it is—maybe I’m not well aware, but as I have heard they were the weapons that they restored all this time for—just so that they’re prepared, if anything happens in Panjshir and now they’re using young students who are not trained. They have lost their lives, and they’re still fighting others. They seem to be like putting forth a lot of effort, but Taliban are doing mass killings, going door by door killing, beheading children, killing women and men. I’ve seen horrible videos in social media of Taliban killing people who were from Panjshir. I just recently watched a video of like people from Panjshir getting abducted by Taliban. And it’s unbelievable. It’s terrifying to see all those things, but yeah, the government of Afghanistan was not well aware and was very weak. They could have fought, but they did not support the troops in the other provinces of Afghanistan. Maybe it was the fear or maybe they were not ready, but now all those weapons are left for Taliban. So now the government does not have any kind of weapon, except those people who are fighting in the resistance group right now in Panjshir. And I’m not sure if it’s enough. They don’t have enough food. They don’t have enough anything there. They don’t have electricity. Everything was cut off by Taliban and they did not let any kind of humanitarian aid to get inside Panjshir. They have blocked all the ways in.

PETER: And just to be clear, when you say “the government,” you’re talking about the former democratic government that was in place for 20 years. Not the current—

FARYAL: Yes, I should get used to saying “the former government”!

PETER: Well, I’m so sorry that you need to, because of course there’s no opposing religious minorities, there’s of course no women, there’s no anybody but the Taliban. And it seems like they are many people who were there 20 years ago—just older. This is one of the things that, you know, for me as an educator, my understanding is that the word Taliban actually comes from Arabic talib, meaning student.

FARYAL: Yes.

PETER: Is that right? You know, reflecting the fact that the group was started by Pakistani religious school students in the mid-1990s. But yeah, as an educator, I struggle with the irony of this term because it doesn’t appear to me that anybody’s learning. How do you think about it? Is it just my own, you know, liberal, Western bias or, how do you think of the meaning of the word Taliban in light of what these men do?

FARYAL: Well, it’s very ironic, as you said. Taliban, yeah, it means “students.” But I don’t understand, first of all, students of what? And second, students would respect other students, and they’re not. They’re not respecting anyone. They do not have any kind of respect for education. So I don’t really understand, first of all, like students of what? If it’s Sharia law, it’s at a very extreme level and it’s not even like—it’s not religion, I know. It’s very political. Yeah, that is a very ironic term, actually. And the fact that they don’t let other people become students, like real students, like going to school getting an education. They are making it so difficult. Recently I just watched a picture of female and male students in the university and how they should be separated. And then they did another demonstration of how women should dress up if

they go to universities. And that is not in our culture. I don’t know how students would learn something behind those black veils. Like, that’s horrible. Like what would happen in the summer? It would be so hard. How will they be able to study in their classroom? There’s so many things that like get on my nerves when I see these things. And I just don’t know where's the logic in it? It’s just all they think about is women and imprisoning them somehow, either with clothes or with other things.

PETER: We should say that this is an audio interview, so people can’t see you. But you do not wear the burqa. You do not conform to fundamentalist standards of dress. How do you think about the choice to, you know, how to dress, you know, what clothes to wear? What thinking goes into it for you?

FARYAL: Well, I love how our Afghan culture dresses. It’s very beautiful. It’s very colorful. It’s not black or too depressing. It has lots and lots of details, and it’s sewn very carefully and with a lot of time and effort. It’s very beautiful and colorful. I love it. I cannot wear it every day because it’s a little bit heavy, but we always wear our traditional dresses in weddings or other events. But I believe every woman should be given the right to dress how they want, even if it’s not it’s not “culturally appropriate.” My personal opinion is a little bit different. I don’t know what women in Afghanistan would think, but like I don’t wear a scarf, and my parents do not have any kind of problem with that. And they respect my choice. So yeah, this is how I am. And I think—I don’t know—in Islam, it was—maybe I’m not well aware, but hijab and burqa—that comes from the culture of Arab people, not Islam. And people confuse that. There are so many ways that you could look modest, but not covered all over with some black burqas. And I think every woman should be given the right to choose whatever they want to wear.

[57:22]

PETER: I wanted to go to a kind of larger question, because we first talked two weeks ago, and I know so much changes day by day. But I’d kind of like to set the stage, especially for U.S. listeners to say that the Watson Institute is an organization at Brown University, which is in Providence, Rhode Island, here in the U.S., so that’s an institute for international and public affairs. And they’ve reported that nearly a quarter of a million people—241,000 people—have been killed in the Afghanistan and Pakistan war zone since 2001—more than 71,000 civilians. They also cite a 2009 report from the Afghan Ministry of Public Health that at that time, in 2009, fully two-thirds of Afghans were suffering from mental health problems as a result of the conflict. That was 12 years ago. The human cost of this conflict has been horrific. However, as you note, as you have experienced, there were also some advances in opportunities, for women and girls in particular, as compared with life under the Taliban rule. You’ve also shared your belief that the U.S. should not have withdrawn from Afghanistan. I know that many things are in flux, and so many things have happened so quickly, but how do you think about it right now? Do you think it would have been better for the U.S. never to have established a presence in the country? Or how do you think about this question?

FARYAL: Maybe it would have been better, but I don’t know what would have happened to the people of Afghanistan if the U.S. wouldn’t have intervened at that time. But I don’t understand: one thing is 20 years of war against Taliban to replace Taliban with Taliban. It does not make any sense. It’s just going in the same direction. We’re going 20 years back, and this is sad.

PETER: Do you think there’s a benefit for what women, young women such as you have experienced so that you’re able to work towards a different Afghanistan?

FARYAL: Personally? Yes. I was given a lot of opportunity. After the fall of Taliban, I was able to go to school. It was not easy or not as my parents explain how they went to school as a girl, for example, because at that time [Ed. note: before the mid-1990s, the initial period of Taliban rule] things were much easier for women. But yeah, I was given a lot of opportunities, and it was thanks to the U.S., because I came here, I got my Bachelor’s and Master’s degree. If the U.S. wouldn’t have invaded Afghanistan, we wouldn’t have had those opportunities in the beginning. And I don’t know what would have happened to the women of Afghanistan at that time.

PETER: So what now? You’ve earned a Bachelor’s degree in psychology, a Master’s degree in sociology. And I know that you were planning further study and thinking about international policy, for example. So as you think about the possible U.S. role going forward, or the role, for that matter, of any other country that was involved in Afghanistan, what could a positive role be at this point?

FARYAL: Yeah, like for other countries not to not to interfere. For example, Pakistan right now is supporting Taliban somehow. And no one is talking about it. Like the news, the politicians, everyone is so silent, and Taliban somehow shows that they are actually fighting against Pakistan. And that’s just to fool people, like how they did a few days ago with the burqa, a demonstration of how women should wear the burqa. Some of those “women” were not women at all. They were Taliban actually behind the burqa. So yeah, they know their ways to fool people, but I was expecting more from the UN to do something, but I don’t know. No one is doing anything, especially right now when I’m seeing the news and watching all those horrifying videos of people getting killed by Taliban in Panjchir. And they’re starving to death. They don’t have any doctors. This is so sad.

PETER: The line is now, as you may know, among people in the United States government—aI’m talking about the White House and President Biden saying, Yes, we understand that women and girls are in danger in Afghanistan. But we also understand that they’re in danger throughout the world. And we want to do the things that we can as a separate country, not an occupying force, to deploy diplomatic means, to deploy humanitarian aid, for example, but not to continue a military presence. To try to support women’s rights, to try to support all human rights, to try to do that … I wanted to see how that sits with you. Does that make sense? Does that seem reasonable? Is there something more specific that you would like to see as far as a role, you know, especially given the U.S. presence over the past two decades, for the U.S. to play now?

FARYAL: Personally I wanted to go to Afghanistan this year to find a job there and work there because I wanted to work for women in Afghanistan. And I’m pretty sure, like my friends who graduated from here, they all went back to Afghanistan to work there. They had opportunities to leave and go abroad and study, or seek asylum in Europe or the U.S., but they didn’t. They decided to go back. And the ones that I know, they had to evacuate Afghanistan, not because they wanted to, because they were forced to. I do believe there were students who wanted to stay in Afghanistan and work there. I mean, I really appreciate the U.S. thinking of other ways to help Afghan women. But if Afghanistan was a better place where we didn’t have to face this from the beginning at all as women—why do we need to get displaced, why do we need to flee our country and not make it a better place? So many people have been saying that, which is true, but yeah, I understand U.S. getting exhausted of supporting Afghanistan, military-wise.

PETER: We spoke a little bit about when we talked a couple of weeks ago about your experience in school, and unfortunately the audio was not great on that conversation [so it couldn’t be used]. You said that your family was very supportive of your going to school, but that you had to go through hell every day to attend high school, for example, fearing the risk of suicide bombers, and that it was a great relief to come to the American University of Central Asia, because you didn’t have that fear anymore. I just wanted to ask if there was anything else that you wanted to share about your experience as somebody who had to fight for an education and had to be especially mindful of it.

FARYAL: Well, I just remembered a particular incident. The fear did not only come from getting targeted by Taliban, either in a bomb blast on our way to school, or like mines that were installed close to the roads. Whenever we would pass by a U.S. military vehicle, we should have this distance [gesturing] from them. And they had this stop sign, like red hand to not come closer than this particular distance. And now when we were coming back from school and we were in our transportation, a school van … and I was, I don’t know, 14 or 15. And I was told that sometimes the U.S. military, I mean the soldiers, sometimes they shoot civilians if they get very close to them. I was very afraid of that happening to me one day. And on this day, the soldier I remember in the vehicle was shouting at our driver to not come closer, but I don’t know, he was going a little bit fast and I ended up screaming in the car because I thought He’s going to shoot very soon. As a teenager, I was like, I don’t know, why did I go through that? Yeah. The other students were laughing at me because they thought it was so stupid. They thought that I shouldn't fear or that they wouldn't shoot, but they looked very serious. And then I remember how in the beginning I was treated when the U.S. military invaded Afghanistan in 2001. I was passing by a street and I was so, so excited to see them passing by the street because they would sometimes throw sweets to us or just like blow kisses from very far distance. And yeah, I was very excited to go to school when I was like five, four. I remember I would go with my mom and then I would be so excited to see them passing in the streets. And most of the time they would wave. I had both like the sweet memories, and then the part where I was afraid that they were going to shoot me. But I do understand that it was, I mean, it was their policy. They had to do whatever to to protect their lives. But I wish that did not happen to civilians. I wish that civilians were not involved, but it’s hard to avoid that. And I understand. But fear of death was not only coming from Taliban. So most of the time I was afraid of U.S. military vehicles to get in our way more than like being afraid of Taliban. Because most of the time, something would happen: a bomb would blast, or … because they were targeted, the U.S. military.

PETER: It must have been a strange transition because of course you had had very negative experiences. You told a story about a Talib assaulting your mother when you were very young—this must have been just about the time or just before the U.S. came into Afghanistan. And so of course you knew that there was the threat of of physical violence from Taliban, that they were very powerful, but then of course you shift over and then there is this, you know, U.S. military and that also comes with some threat of violence. It must’ve been a very difficult and disorienting childhood.

FARYAL: Not in the beginning, because in the beginning they were nice towards children, but then I heard like stories where they shot even little children, because they thought those children were a threat, and it might be true to some extent, not true to another, but I guess we don’t know for sure. So after that, I had that fear, but in the beginning, I was so excited. I would go to school happily to see them. And I still remember, like, they were all bald and and I thought like, All the Americans look like!

PETER: Wait, I’m sorry. All the Americans looked just bald, or they looked like something else?

FARYAL: Yes, bald. But it was a good thing for me. I don’t know. I liked it.

[61:14]

PETER: Can I ask if when you were in high school, was there a moment that you decided I want to continue? You know, I want to learn more, I definitely want to go to college to university to learn more. Was there something about it, or was it just that you could? I'm interested if there was maybe an idea or a field of study that got you, like fired up. I know you did your Bachelor’s in psychology, but I don’t know if you decided that you wanted to do that before you went to university. Was there something that made you say, like, I want to go to college?

FARYAL: Yeah, the drive for education came from my parents, first of all. They wanted me to have a degree because everyone in our family has a Bachelor's degree, and also a Master's degree as well. So after high school, I should have thought about what I want to study, but I specifically did not know psychology, but of course, continuing my education was a must. And it didn't only come from the family. Men and women who just graduate from the 12th grade in Afghanistan are not well respected by the society and also not given the opportunity to work. So I would have had less opportunity to work. And maybe I would have been less respected by people around me because the people of Afghanistan really do respect education, and all those people who—it does not matter if you’re a woman, but they would criticize all the time, like going abroad as a woman is not a good thing for any Afghan. I mean, maybe some families, they do allow that, but with a lot of struggles and difficulties, like my friends had a lot of difficulties convincing their parents to give them permission to study here. But apart from that, people are supportive of education. Everyone wants to become engineer or a doctor.

PETER: I remember that. That's in my notes, the jobs and the money. We got a lot of that in the U.S. as well. Very last thing. When we spoke before, you said, “I hope that Afghanistan is not just a trend right now, that the media will figure out a way to continue to cover Afghanistan.” I’ve been listening to reports about the many journalists who have had to flee the country, who have decided to flee the country for their lives, the threats on their lives. And you were very much hoping that the world will not forget about Afghanistan. Is there anything else that you would like for people to be thinking about, or is there any way that would recommend for us to continue to learn about what’s happening in Afghanistan? Because again, news is not easy to come by.

FARYAL: It's just for people to know that for Afghan women specifically, Afghanistan will not ever become a place to live. For those who think Biden’s decisions are so right, maybe it was right. And yes, I know that it was not all his decision. It was decided before, by other former presidents as well. But I just think the way it was done was not right. They have lost a lot of people. Afghans have lost a lot of lives as well. So I wish that could have been done more thoughtfully and more strategically, but yes, I want the world to know that Afghan women are fighting right now against Taliban. They're protesting in the streets while others are just watching and they’re making history. They are putting their lives in danger. Yeah, I cannot imagine. I would have done the same thing, I think, if I was in Afghanistan. I would have been as as angry as they are. I would like the world to always remember Afghan women and support Afghan women as much as they can, because Afghanistan is not a place anymore for them to live. And the situation right now looks very hopeless. I don't know if things will get better in Afghanistan. So for Afghan women it’s going to get even worse. I want the world to remember Afghan women as these rebellious, defiant women who would fight for their lives, who would risk their lives, fighting for their rights, and not being afraid of any kind of threat. I’m sure you have watched those pictures where Taliban have pointed their guns towards a woman. And she’s just looking at him back very angrily. That’s how far they can go to have their rights back. And most of them also say that they’re not doing this to be able to work in the government or work in a high-rank position in the government. They're doing it because they don't have freedom for themselves. And the thing is, according to our culture, to how we were raised or what we were taught, what we were taught was right—according to our culture, the way we dress, the way we play music, that’s all banned. And nothing looks like Afghan anymore. I don't know who they are, honestly. People are more worried about losing a sense of a big part of their identity, starting from the flag and then these dress codes and not being able to play music or sing, and that's a huge part of our culture. And it's so sad that it's been taken away from us. I want the world to know that that's not what Afghans want. I mean, men do not want it as well, but somehow they don't have the courage to take some serious steps, or to talk about it. But only those who are fighting in Panjchir are really courageous, they are risking so much. And they are people who are not trained to fight, but they are doing whatever they can to protect their lands, and they're also fighting for Afghan women’s rights as they told us. So yeah, I hope that will end well for Afghans.

[VO]: That's it for today's show! My great thanks to Duane Lacey and Faryal Haidary for joining me, and thanks to you for listening, sharing, rating, and reviewing Point of Learning. If you were looking for another reason to support this show, I will be donating all Patreon contributions for the month of October to help Afghan men, women, and children relocating to Buffalo. If you join by September 30th, you will help support that—details on the show page. Of course, you're also encouraged to donate directly to organizations supporting Afghans. The show page will also feature a list of reputable organizations, as well as a link to the episode of the Entitled podcast out of the University of Chicago Law School that featured Faryal last month. Special thanks to Sluggy, a Denver-based artist who accepted my challenge of remixing some traditional (and not so traditional) Kyrgyz music for today's soundtrack. I'd also like to give a shout-out to Jenn Starrett from putting Duane and me back in touch. Point of Learning is written, recorded, edited, and mixed by me here in Sunny Buffalo, New York. I'm Peter Horn, and I'll be back at you in a few weeks with artist and photography professor John Opera. See you then!  

No Bad Food Transcript (033)

GREG JACKSON: Hi, I’m Greg Jackson, owner of Action J Productions, and you are at the Point of Learning with my friend and former high school English teacher, Peter Horn. Today Pete is talking with Britt Schuman-Humbert, a registered dietitian whose YouTube show RD Unfiltered I produce and edit. I’d say I’m excited to hear what they’ll be discussing, but I already know it’s good, because I listened in on their whole Zoom session. I’ve been in touch with Pete at various points over the 22 years since I graduated high school, including reaching out after his interview with conductor JoAnn Falletta last fall, which brought back some happy memories for me about the power of music, especially when I was a little kid. When Point of Learning joined Patreon, I was one of the first to join. It’s true that I pledge on the “Collaborator” tier, but that’s not the reason I’ve recently literally collaborated with Pete, consulting on recent episodes and helping to create this one. I do that because I believe in this podcast all about what and how and why we learn. If you’d like to join me, hit pause for just a second and visit patreon.com/pointoflearningpodcast. Thank you, and enjoy the show!

[01:28] * NOTE: Times indicated are for audio version. Video companion timings vary slightly.

PETER HORN (voiceover): On today’s show ...

BRITT SCHUMAN-HUMBERT: Diets do not work. They do not work. They never have. And they never probably will.

[VO]: … clinical dietitian Britt Schuman-Humbert. We talk about her fabulous YouTube cooking series featuring tasty, balanced recipes for real people.

BRITT: People just want to feel good and they want to be healthier, and they just want to figure out: How do I take my crazy life—and here’s my health issues, and here’s my family’s health issues, and how do I put this all together and not feel bad that I didn’t have everybody eating kale and tofu for dinner?

[VO]: Britt has extensive experience working alongside mental health professionals to treat eating disorders.

BRITT: The highest level that your relationship with food can be is where you look at food and it’s not “Do I deserve this? Do I not deserve this? Am I allowed to eat this? Should I eat this? Is this against the rules?”— whatever the torment is in your brain.

[VO]: Her YouTube show is called RD Unfiltered, and she is a registered dietitian who speaks her mind.

BRITT: I would love to teach children about sex, about drugs, about Stranger Danger, about guns. They should learn this as early as possible. But what I really want is I want them to not learn about calories until they’re 21 years old!

[VO]: Coming up: the toxic messages we can unwittingly transmit to kids, how your liver is really in charge, nutritional support for trans youth and adults, and so much more! All right, here’s the show! 

[03:28]

PETER: Britt Schuman-Humbert is a clinical dietitian with over 25 years of experience in the field of clinical nutrition. Growing up not too far from where I am in New York State, Britt is a graduate of Syracuse University who is board certified in pediatrics and sports nutrition, and she’s currently preparing for additional certification in strength and conditioning, studying how exercise and food interact. [NOTE: Since recording, Britt has earned this certification.] As a dietitian, she has worked with a wide range of clients and patients: from little kids and athletes to people living with cancer and diabetes and various kidney conditions, to name a few. But she came onto my radar as a cook who happens to know a lot about nutrition. I knew I wanted to speak with her after watching many episodes of her fantastic YouTube series RD Unfiltered and trying more than a few of the delicious recipes she guides viewers through in a laidback, no-nonsense, playful style that would make me feel comfortable in the kitchen even if I didn’t love cooking already. I’ve made her Maximum Protein Mac ‘n’ Cheese and “Air-Fried Chicken Wings Without the Air Fryer” (those are actual video titles). Both great, and when it comes to wings, remember I grew up here in Sunny Buffalo. Robyn made her double chocolate peanut butter banana bread—even yummier, and far healthier than you imagine—which we both loved, pretty much inhaling it in two days. But maybe I’m most grateful for her video “How to Roast a Turkey: No Apologies,” which I studied last December 25th when I found myself hosting Christmas dinner for the first time in my 45 years. Tender, tasty, juicy, and maybe almost as pleasant—no basting! We’ll get back to her YouTube show in just a few minutes, but I want to start with Britt’s day job as a clinical dietitian who collaborates with two mental health professionals at Oak City Psychology in Raleigh, NC, a practice that specializes in supporting people with eating disorders, as well as those who identify as LGBTQ+.

PETER: Britt, welcome! So good to have you here!

BRITT: Thank you so much. Thank you! I’m extremely excited to be here.

PETER: So let's start big picture. According to a 2019 independent market research study, around 97 million people in the U.S., mostly women, have set weight loss as their major goal. This morning I searched the term “nutrition diet books” and Google took less than 2 seconds to yield about 248 million results—just about nutrition and diet books. Without even considering online webinars or TikTok videos dispensing diet advice, there are lots of places to get nutritional information. Asking as somebody who has never worked with a dietitian or nutritionist, what’s the benefit of consulting one-on-one with a trained professional, as opposed to reading a book, say, written for a general audience?

BRITT: Well, you know, one of the things that I really think would help nutrition in general is I really wish there were more registered dietitians out there in the universe. Nutrition is very personal. It is like a thumbprint, and how you grow up, what your personal preferences are, what you have done as far as your health, your exercise, what you have not done, what kind of medications you take, what your activity or stress level is during the day, what your genetic makeup might be … all of these things make up who you are and actually create a nutrition profile for a registered dietitian. And so when you take a book off a shelf and you open it up, the odds that that book is going to have the right information for you are extremely low. And at best, what you will do is try to conform your life into something that it’s not, and it doesn’t really fit. And you’re going to end up considering yourself a failure and that you have a lack of willpower and that it makes you feel bad. And then there is a cascade of events that occurs from restricting and so on that comes down, and then it compromises your health even further. And usually you end up with even more weight gain or more health problems than when you started in the first place. So that is why I strongly recommend you find a registered dietitian to help anybody or yourself to improve your nutritional status and your health.

PETER: Wow. So there’s a significant chance that it’s not only not going to be as helpful as it could, it could actually backfire!

BRITT: It will backfire. It almost always backfires.

PETER: You’ve said that you got started to get really interested in nutrition in your teens, which is when what some call “Diet Culture” was really starting to take hold in the U.S. Weight Watchers, now known as “WW,” has been around since the ‘60s, but around the time you were in high school there was a proliferation of diet systems, plans, and scams coming from all over. I think I’m pretty close to your age, and I remember the ads all over TV promising miracles. Do you think that what some call Diet Culture is partially to blame for the now widespread sense of food having a moral value—that there’s “good food” and “bad food”?

BRITT: Yes. Just absolutely yes. So in the 1980s, and actually it’s kind of really funny. So when I talk to my patients with eating disorders, we sort of, we call them “ED”—

PETER: Oh, [ED] for Eating Disorder.

BRITT: Yeah. And like we create like a different persona for this person that’s fighting it. I’m like, “Oh, that’s ED talking,” or something. Quite often, the way I envision ED in my mind is as a 1980s registered dietitian where, you know, we have made eggs completely taboo, and something has fat in it, or you’re not supposed to do this. And you have all these rules that came out of the 1980s and, you know, milk went completely skim and everything was like NO FAT. And it just went crazy and it was exercise all the time. And if you look, you will see that’s right where obesity and, you know, people with issues with weight and diabetes really started to rise. It’s right at that time, because we started to deprive ourselves a little bit more than we probably should have. So back to your question, I think, yes, there’s absolutely a Diet Culture, and it’s not going away. It’s getting worse with social media and TikTok and these types of things that now the teenagers are looking at all the time. So when I chose to become a registered dietitian, I was, you know, 16, 17. And it was the late ‘80s. (Yes, we’re about the same age.) And so I grew up—my mother actually is super awesome, and I talk about her all the time in our YouTube videos—

PETER: Wonderful baker, that’s what I know!

BRITT: She’s a wonderful baker. She’s also like one of 10 kids and she grew up on a farm and they didn’t have soda. They didn’t have candy bars. They didn’t get those things. They grew up poor. You know, they just had what they had. And so as a response to that, I actually grew up having a lot of candy bars and a lot of soda, because it was things that she did not have as a child. And actually that is a very typical response in parenting for children: you give your child what you kind of really valued yourself or missed as a child. And so I started to get into nutrition when I realized I could get a candy bar in my lunch box and the other kids would be like, “Oh, that’s not good for you!” And my mom was doing me a great service, in a way. You know, I was fine. I was perfectly healthy. I was running around, but I never actually created a feeling of taboo around soda or a candy bar or chocolate. I mean, I love that stuff, but I can take it or leave it. And it wasn’t actually until I became a dietitian that I started—and we’ll talk about those in the YouTube videos too, where I’ll do terrible things to chocolate chip cookies and try to make them fat-free or something like that. So that’s how I became a dietitian, and how I made mistakes as a dietitian, and how the Diet Culture is still there, long story short.

[12:52]

PETER: Well when you talked about messages that kids can internalize, I have to say that when we spoke together last month to brainstorm a little bit and spitball about what we might talk about today, one of the things you said that really gave me pause was that nutrition as a topic can be “lethal” in some instances, if somebody says the wrong thing to a child and they internalize it. Could you elaborate on that a little bit?

BRITT: It can be anything, and it can be completely benign and meant a certain way. And it doesn’t even have to be towards them. For example, you know, as an adult, you might say, you know, “I’m not going to have any more carbs today. I way overdid it for breakfast” or something like that. And it could be an innocent diet reference that a child sitting next to you—it wasn’t intended for them at all, but they could hear it and they can process it. And they’re going to be like, “Oh, those pancakes I had for breakfast were bad for me? That was not good? So I shouldn’t have bread now?” And they start to process, because they’re just trying to figure out the world. And so they’re trying to get the answers to some of these questions. And so it can be a real problem. And you can have children as young as 10 or 11, you know, concerned about carbohydrates. So that can be extremely dangerous. Yes.

PETER: This is one of the things that I think is an interesting point, because I think when many of us think about eating disorders, I think a lot of us assume that like, teenage girls are very much at risk, you know, because in large part to the barrage of messages, particularly about female body image that they’ve been exposed to through various media since before they were old enough to speak, and of course, toxic messages can come from family and friends as well. But recently a friend of mine wrote a very powerful blog post about her family’s struggle with the disordered eating of a child that started well before the child was 10. Especially because this is something that a lot of us may not be aware of or attuned to, what are some of the warning signs of possible eating disorders for younger kids?

BRITT: Ritualistic behaviors is a big one. I think when you see young kids suddenly get very involved in making meals in the kitchen, people are often very proud of that. “Oh, my daughter who’s nine makes dinner for everybody. She made us zucchini taco boats!” I start looking at that. I start thinking about that. So it’s like ritualistic behaviors, or if they start asking about serving sizes and they start weighing their food, or they won’t eat their food unless they know how many calories is in that item. Sometimes you’ll see kids just choose pre-packaged foods because they know the calories are [indicated] on there. So it could be that they’re eating just wrappers. If they start having negative self-talk about their body. They’re complaining about the size of their shoulders, or their belly, or their legs. Or another really interesting one is if they start making really interesting foods in the kitchen that are missing an ingredient. For example, they’re trying to make muffins, but there’s no flour in them and there’s no fat in them and there’s no sugar in them.

PETER: Is that a muffin though? Is that a muffin?

BRITT: It is not a muffin! You know, one of the other things … not a patient, this was just a random kid asking me a question the other day. She’s like, “You know, I saw that you can make chicken on TikTok using flour and water.” I’m like, “Chicken? You can make chicken out of flour and water on TikTok?” She’s like, “Yeah, I saw it on TikTok. So that that’s gotta be true.” So these are the things that are now hitting us, which makes it a brave new world that we have to navigate.

PETER: Yeah. I wanted to thank you so much for that, for the detail about how they’re making recipes. Because of course, you know, you could see some kids just getting involved in cooking and really enjoying it and still making the same kinds of recipes that they grew up with. And that is something. So there are some twists to it. You know, if it feels like they’re taking control of the meal time or—

BRITT: Exactly. It’s not that they’re making dinner. If they’re making dinner and they have used butter and white flour and that’s the recipe and they’re just doing it because they want to make dinner. That’s great. Two things: 1.) Did they eat it, or did they just make it for you? That can be a sign. So that’s one sign. 2.) If they didn’t use regular butter and flour and they used a banana or they found something on TikTok and it’s low-carb or keto or something like that, that’s when you start asking questions, like “Why? What brought you to think that this was a good idea to make this?” That kind of thing.

[18:55]

PETER: One more question about your practice, because you work alongside, you work with two mental health professionals in a practice that specializes in supporting people not only with eating disorders, but also people who identify as LGBTQ+, right?

BRITT: Correct.

PETER: Like many people, I’ve been thinking a lot about trans kids in recent weeks, as so many states are pushing misguided laws and regulations that put this especially vulnerable population of young people, and in some cases their health providers at real risk, even though the supporters purport to be protecting children. Keeping our focus on food and eating, I wanted to ask whether you are consulted as a clinical dietitian with those LGBTQ+ clients at your practice. Just to back up for some context for you, 20 years ago, when I was working at Westfield High School in New Jersey (where I met your producer), we were starting the first Gay-Straight Alliance in the county—this is the year 2000—which became a safe space for kids from all throughout the region. Part of the case we made when we were doing that—part of the case we made to our colleagues was that LGBT youth were at greater risk of suicide, depression, drug abuse, homelessness, even pregnancy. And that’s why WHS needed a Gay-Straight Alliance. We said to those colleagues, “You know, we know you care about kids. These kids are at greater risk. This isn’t about a possible moral objection to homosexuality, for instance. This is about your moral commitment to all kids.” So do you find that people who identify as LGBTQ+ are also at greater risk for, for example, disordered eating, and coupled with that, is your approach as a dietitian any different?

BRITT: Yes, they are at much greater risk for disordered eating and eating disorders because their body, and how they feel about their body, and where their body is in relation to their mind or what they want to be, can be at odds, especially when they are young. And so it is a problem. In addition to that, being a registered dietitian, in treating a patient that is trans— You know, if you think about the calculations that are used when we determine energy levels, when we determine estimated calorie needs … let’s take the Harris-Benedict Equation. This has a male and a female version: male, female all the way down the line. There are very few, with the exception of another one—it’s called the Cunningham Equation, which then you have to obtain body composition, which means you have to determine how much body fat they have, which is definitely not appropriate. So treating somebody that is trans and potentially identifies with a different gender from when they were born, you don’t want to put them “male” or “female,” and they may be taking hormones at this point that are physically changing their energy usage. So how to manage this? We use something called indirect calorimetry, which is actually considered the gold standard for determining energy needs. And what that is: it’s actually very unexciting. It looks like the size of a toaster. And it’s kind of like a tube, and it goes over your mouth and your nose, and it measures how much carbon dioxide and oxygen you use for a period of time. And from those numbers, we can extrapolate exactly how many calories your body burns, regardless of if you have thyroid issues, if you’ve been on diets your whole life, if you’re taking estrogen or if you’re taking testosterone, I get real numbers based on your body. And I don’t have to know what sex you identify with. It’s just your body. These are your numbers. And so by doing that, we can actually treat the person as the person, and they don’t have to identify one way or another. So that’s really what makes us unique in providing nutrition counseling for this community. If you have a young child that is trans and they need to see a dietitian—and they often do, for just the reasons you said: they are at higher risk for depression, they are at higher risk for all kinds of mental health issues, as well as eating disorders. And so just being able to calculate their estimated needs and being able to provide them with a healthy diet and have them feel body-positive and take care of their body is the ultimate goal.

[24:59]

PETER: Shifting gears, booze!

BRITT: Good stuff!

PETER: Right? Another round! Just kidding. I’ll wait. You said when we talked last month that part of the misunderstanding many people have about working out is that we are under the impression that we can almost choose what our bodies burn for fuel, like, “I’m gonna run this morning, so I’m gonna burn some fat.” Instead, you explained, it’s your liver that decides. The liver decides if the body is going to burn carbs, or fat, or muscle—or, I imagine, metabolize alcohol, if it’s in the body—at any given time. Do I have that right? It sounds like [that’s right].

BRITT: Yes, yes.

PETER: Okay, so hypothetical—let’s say I have a couple cocktails some Saturday evening. I get to bed by midnight, say, and get up for an 8:30 Mark Fisher Fitness or Shawn Blakeslee training session on Zoom. I have water and coffee before I work out, but that’s it. What’s my liver gonna do?

BRITT: Well, it depends. It really does depend on what else you did the day before, as far as nourishing your body, and how hard that particular workout is going to be for you. What I mean by that is there is a whole spectrum of how you burn fuel based on your heart rate and how intense that is. The higher your intensity goes, the more likely you are burning carbohydrate for fuel, the more likely you are what we call anaerobic, where you’re actually burning carbohydrate. Now alcohol. If you only had two cocktails—if you really only had two, and it’s several hours later, it’s pretty much been worked through your system. However, you could be, and very likely are, a little dehydrated. And as [little] as a 2% change in body weight will cause a change in how well you can exercise. And so what that means is what you normally find easy, you find a lot more difficult, and because you find it more difficult, you actually burn less fat and burn more carbohydrate. Does that make any sense?

PETER: It does. So if you were doing something that would be a little bit easier for you, you might get into the fat because you’d still be doing aerobic respiration.

BRITT: Yes. You would still be using aerobic respiration.

PETER: And does the amount of water—like having that before the workout or before you go to bed, is that going to affect that?

BRITT: Yeah, if you are well hydrated before you go to bed and you’ve been drinking a lot of water and you wake up and you drink a good half a liter, you know, two 16-ounce glasses of water, you know, about an hour before you actually go to exercise— Don’t do it any closer than that, because then it’s just kind of sitting and sloshing around in your gut and it’s not really giving you any performance benefit. Then you’re probably going to be okay. Now if you drink alcohol after you work out, there is a lot of research that shows that it actually inhibits the ability for your body to build muscle or repair muscle, which is actually what you want to happen when you work out. So that’s something to keep in mind too. So if you’ve worked out that day and you’re planning to go have some cocktails later that afternoon, know that it may not be as effective as a workout if you hadn’t.

PETER: All right. Because that’s just a little depressing, I’m going to move on to your fabulous show …

BRITT: Sorry. I know. Dietitians can be depressing.

PETER: No, just kidding! No, it makes sense and it’s helpful to know.

[29:30]

PETER: On to your fabulous show on YouTube! The show is called RD Unfiltered, as in “Registered Dietitian giving it to you straight”—or at least that’s how I take it, and people can check it out by searching that on YouTube and/or visiting and subscribing to your [YouTube] channel, Britt RD. As I said earlier, the show is totally delightful, with no-nonsense, healthy but delicious recipes presented in about 10 minutes or less for soups, desserts, quick weeknight meals, great holiday classics like roast turkey and ham, or cranberry sorbet with prosecco. A recent episode compared two chilis, one made with beef and one with a beef-substitute. And you had some interesting information about how the body metabolizes the vegetable-based protein a little differently from beef-based protein. There’s even a 38-second gem called “Pizza Happens,” where you announce that there will be no “nutritioning” or cooking because you’re spent and you’re just gonna order in some pizza. That’s an obvious outlier, but it totally fits with your vibe that this is about real food solutions for real people who lead real lives that don’t always allow time for a home-cooked meal—even an easy home-cooked meal. I want to note that you usually include some message about nutrition or food science as you work through a recipe, but it never feels like anything approaching a lecture. For instance, in a recent installment called “Strawberry Shortcake and Other Dessert Discussions,” you emphasized that dessert should be considered part of a meal—not a reward for “cleaning your plate,” for instance—but part of the meal. In your demo of split pea soup with ham, you mentioned how important it is for kids to see adults eating different kinds of food. But it never feels preachy. After a quarter-century in nutrition, why’d you decide to make this show?

BRITT: So the “unfiltered” part, we had originally planned to have a lot more swearing or cursing in the show, but I just didn’t feel the need, so we haven’t done any of that. But so I feel like now the “RD Unfiltered” is—you’re right. I’m actually just sharing how I live. I’m sharing how does a dietitian really live? We are not the food police. We actually order pizza and eat strawberry shortcake because it tastes good. So that’s really the purpose of it, I think, at this point— So, with kids, here’s the thing. It’s called Ellyn Satter’s Division of Responsibility, and here’s where we all screwed it up and we got it all broken is that, when they’re babies, we are taught to trust the child. Like they say, “You know, your baby will tell you when he’s hungry. Your baby will tell you when they’re not. Don’t worry about it! Your baby will let you know.” Actually they have those internal cues up until easily the age of eight years old, and it’s called “eating competency” or Ellyn Satter’s Division of Responsibility, where the kids, you just have to trust them. And they will sometimes eat a tremendous amount. And sometimes they won’t and that’s why we don’t want them to clean their plate. And don’t get too crazy about it! Don’t get caught up in the whole craziness about everything, all the hype in the books, all the hype on the internet—even though I’m on the internet, you’re on the internet, we’re all on the internet. But you know, it’s just, you know, it’s okay. Pizza is allowed, you know? Dessert tastes good, and you want to eat it. It could be where, if you’re feeding a child who probably didn’t eat a lot of dinner, this way you might be able to use some vanilla yogurt and have them crush some Oreo cookies into it and have them eat that. It enhances the texture, it enhances their calcium intake, their protein intake … and they think you’re a hero because you gave them dessert! So it’s that kind of stuff. Everybody needs to just take a breath. So that’s what the “unfiltered” means now.

[34:10]

PETER: One of the things I was thinking about it as I was preparing for this interview, and especially when you said we’re both on the internet, you know, it’s a little bit of a similar place. I mean, like for example, the way I describe this podcast, it’s a show about what and how and why we learn. But part of the reason that I wanted to make it was to be able to communicate some of the most important ideas that I’ve figured out about what and how and why we learn with a larger audience, that is to say, larger than any given class that I would have, or any given group of colleagues, you know, that I could do at one time, so that people who might be interested in some of these things about a range of topics could have access to them asynchronously, as we say. And I wondered if there was a little bit of a comparison: you figured out some stuff, some things that you’ve found yourself saying, or ideas that you’ve relied on, or perhaps refined, over the course of your professional clinical experience. And this is a way to almost like, you know, I mean, maybe a lump of sugar makes the medicine go down! I mean, you are sharing valuable nutritional information, but it’s presented in these recipes. So I wondered if that was consciously part of the project for you to have that those ideas find a wider audience than just the students you might be teaching at the time, or clients you might be working with. I wondered if that was part of it, because I certainly end up learning.

BRITT: It is. It’s for everyone. I’ve sat with thousands of people, just, you know, “Hey!” like kind of open door, “Come and tell me what kinds of nutrition questions you have.” And there does seem to be a little bit of a pattern. You know, people just want to feel good and they want to be healthier and they just want to figure out: How do I take my crazy life—and here’s my health issues, and here’s my family’s health issues, and how do I put this all together and not feel bad that I didn’t have everybody eating kale and tofu for dinner? You know, that’s what the internet is doing to us. Everybody needs to like take a breath. Like strawberry shortcake and pizza are great. There’s no reason that you can’t. And we actually find that when you start giving yourself permission, and you take a breath and you relax into it, people’s health improves, their body composition changes. They actually stop trying to diet and they actually lose body fat and they feel better. And their blood pressure goes down, and their blood sugars are well controlled. It’s called intuitive eating. And that’s why dietitians all the time say diets do not work. They do not work. They never have. And they never probably will.

[37:33]

PETER: That’s one of the things that I recalled from what we talked about you know, when we chatted last month, that you want to give people permission to like what they’re eating. But also that your show, again, based on your professional clientele, that you also want it to be a safe space for kids, for example, with eating disorders, or ballet dancers and everybody else. To circle back to that calorie question, I noticed you don’t talk in specific terms about calories, for example, how many calories might be in a serving of a given dish. And I’m fairly certain, that’s an intentional choice, right?

BRITT: It is intentional. Well, I think when we were first starting out, we started to include some [calorie counts], and then we pushed that to the side and were like, “That’s not what we want. We want to make this safe space because there are not a lot of safe spaces for patients with eating disorders.” We don’t [include calorie information], but you know what [the recipes] are, they’re balanced. They are healthy. Even the strawberry shortcake. The one that I did for dessert has strawberries in it. It’s high in vitamin C, you know. Yes, there’s a biscuit mix, but it’s a really cool biscuit that we make, and they’re not out of control and it’s delicious and it makes you happy. And guess what? Then, you’re not, you know, secretly eating a bag of chips or doing some other crazy things with it. So that’s really how I like to think of it. One of the things that I say a lot is “I would love to teach children about sex, about drugs, about Stranger Danger, about guns. They should learn this as early as possible. But what I really want is I want them to not learn about calories until they’re 21 years old!”

PETER: Yeah, that’s right!

BRITT: That’s what I really want. They should not learn about calories until they are much older.

PETER: Oh man! Outside of chemistry class, for example, but those are different. [The “calorie” we refer to with respect to food is actually a kilocalorie in chemistry. A kilocalorie is the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of 1 kilogram of water one degree Celsius.]

BRITT: Different kinds of calories. Yeah.

[39:52]

PETER: This is one of the ways that I think that getting healthier with respect to food is so much different than say, a habit like tobacco, you know, which you can just cut out. It’s hard, but you can just cut it out of your life and you’ll be okay. But you can’t not eat. You’re going to have to eat. And so your relationship with food can’t be one of complete denial and feeling self- abnegation all the time or you’re gonna snap. And I guess that’s the rationale behind diets not working, or too restrictive a diet not working.

BRITT: Yeah, you know, anorexia has the highest mortality rate among all of the mental illnesses. And so the hardest thing about treating someone with an eating disorder is you can’t take food and take it out of their life. You have to bring it into their lives and you have to constantly talk about it, and challenge them, and bring them back to safety. And many people in the United States do have what we call disordered eating. They do not necessarily have an eating disorder, but they do have disordered eating, and there are situations where they are afraid of food or where if they’re going to eat this piece of cake, well, “I have to go to the gym tomorrow and I’m going to have to burn 400 more calories to compensate for this piece of cake,” which by the way, is the definition of purging. So yes, those are the things that make it very, very difficult to treat eating disorders or improve on habits. So giving people permission to just like what they like and take a step back and take a breath and learn to eat when they’re hungry and eat the cookie because they want the cookie, not because the cookie is forbidden or is taboo, or they’re eating the cookie because they’re dehydrated or they’re eating the cookie because they haven’t had any protein because they’re trying to be vegan. Whatever the reason that you might want to go for the cookie, I want it to be the cookie, because you know what? The chocolate chip cookie tastes good and you want to eat it! And once you have one and it felt good and that’s great. And maybe you want two. Great. If you don’t, great also. Get a glass of milk. You know, that’s what we want it to be. We want food to be like air. It’s neutral. You can enjoy some things and you can dislike other things, but that’s hopefully the ultimate objective. The highest level that your relationship with food can be is where you look at food and it’s not “Do I deserve this? Do I not deserve this? Am I allowed to eat this? Should I eat this? Is this against the rules?”— whatever the torment is in your brain. We’ve got to get to the point where you’re just eating the food. There are things, we call them “fear foods,” where people are just absolutely terrified to eat a piece of whole grain bread or a slice of pizza or ice cream, or put sugar in a cup of tea. Like these are just terrifying things to them. And they’re truly afraid of those things.

[43:34]

PETER: I haven’t watched lots of cooking shows. I do enjoy some Great British Bake Off every once in a while—

BRITT: Me too!

PETER: —and I definitely had an Iron Chef moment when the Japanese version first came to the U.S. But mostly I never really got down with Emeril or Rachel Ray or any of those, and I think sometimes it was because the cooking experience seems so artificial. The recipe calls for a half-cup of chopped onion, and look over there! It’s a prep bowl with half a cup of chopped onion ready to pick up! Almost always, everything comes off without a hitch and the finished product looks like it’s ready to be photographed for a magazine. In other words, it’s kind of hard for the home cook to try themself and not end up feeling a little inadequate. And then there’s you, Britt—

BRITT (laughing): Nailed it!

PETER: —getting in there, chopping your own onions—often in time-lapse, but we can see what’s involved. When stuff goes wrong, you roll with it. When you reached for a bag of tortilla chips recently, you discovered that your kids had eaten half of it.

BRITT: Totally!

PETER: Maybe my favorite example comes from the roast turkey procedure, which involves flipping the bird at one point, which you say—and I believe you!—you usually do without incident (and I was able to do, humble brag by the host), but when you tried to flip it for the video, the bird fell apart! And as if you were channeling Julia Child, you were like, “No harm, no foul, no one’s gonna know, I’m carving it anyway, it’s gonna taste great.” It’s like a reality show, except, you know, real! In addition to being absolutely endearing and encouraging, I’m assuming this vibe is quite intentional, that you want people to be okay with what happens in there.

BRITT: All right. Well, I gotta be honest. You know, I don’t intend the turkey to come apart when I’m in the middle [of taping]!

PETER: No, I don’t mean the “turkey foul,” but like the way you respond to it, you know, like it’s not a crisis, you know?

BRITT: Okay. Yeah. It’s not a crisis. This is cooking! This is real-life cooking. You’re going to open a bag of chips, or you’re going to think you have a bag of chips and you discover you only have half a bag of chips, because there’s other people in the house. Or like, yeah, you pull the bird apart and it literally comes apart. Or, you know— Okay, I gotta tell this story.

PETER: Please!

BRITT: So the story is, you know, for starters, I’m not a talented cook. There’s no talent; it’s practice. So I’m making dinner for the first time for my boyfriend / future husband, who’s French, right? And so he’s French, and I’m making him French onion soup and this garlicky like scallops and shrimp dish, and he’s coming over and I’m like cooking the onions in my not cast-iron skillet, but a regular, like non-stick fry pan in my first apartment. And [the recipe] says caramelize for two and a half hours, so I slap that pan down, high heat, put my onions in there, moved them around and let them cook for two and a half hours like that. I made a bowl of ashes! I never tasted them. So then I’m like putting the beef broth in, and the wine, and I melt the cheese over the top. And of course I never tasted the food, because why would I taste it? I didn’t know any better. I give it to my husband. And like, I taste it. It looked gorgeous because the cheese was melted over the top. And it was a dark black, beautiful color. But if you tasted it, it was literally a bowl of ashes I served him for his very first meal. And so, you know, I’m like, “Don’t eat it, don’t eat it, just don’t eat it!” So then the point is that, you know, this stuff takes practice, and you’re never going to be perfectly good, and you’re going to have to roll with it and think on your feet and just be like—I mean, Julia Child was right: Don’t apologize. You’re making dinner for somebody. Just let it go. So it’s not intentional. It’s just literally what happens. It’s just what happens. And it’s going to be that way.

[48:36]

PETER: We’ve touched on a number of topics. Is there anything you would have liked me to ask that I did not ask, or is there any other really widespread misconception about nutrition or diet that you’d like to touch on briefly?

BRITT: If you’re listening to this podcast and you suspect that somebody you love potentially—or you yourself potentially—does have an eating disorder, I strongly recommend you get some help. And that can be through the National Eating Disorders Association, which is nationaleatingdisorders.org—very easy to figure out—or the International Association of Eating Disorder Professionals, which is iaedp.com. I just wanted to put those out there because it is COVID. People have been isolated for a very long time. You’re probably very stressed. It’s stressful out there now. And so you might find that more people are at greater risk. And so if you need help, that’s where you can start.

[49:46]

[VO]: That’s it for today’s show! My great thanks to Britt Schuman-Humbert for joining me, and to Greg Jackson for introducing me to Britt, and then masterfully coordinating many production elements for this episode, including making the video companion. I can’t wait to see it! You can find Britt’s show RD Unfiltered as well as subscribe to her channel by searching “Britt RD” on YouTube. That’s Britt with two Ts. You will thank me for it! Thanks as always to Shayfer James for intro and outro music. Today’s soundtrack additionally features some of the music heard on episodes of RD Unfiltered; information about those tracks, links to the episode transcript and YouTube version and a whole lot more is available on the show page for this episode. Every show page for all 33 flavors of Point of Learning as well as voluminous supplemental materials are always available at hornedconsulting.org/pointoflearningpodcast. If you’ve ever heard me mention the “show page” but not known what I’m talking about, that’s one way to find it. Or you can scroll down in your podcast app of choice, where the episode show page is usually linked. If it isn’t, please let me know—I always love to hear from you. Thanks to each and every one of you for listening, sharing, reviewing and rating this podcast. A proud member of the Lyceum consortium of education podcasts, Point of Learning is usually written, recorded, edited, and mixed by me here in Sunny Buffalo, but today I’m fortunate for the prodigious contributions of Greg “Action” Jackson, owner of Action J Productions in Stamford, Connecticut. As he mentioned at the top of the show, you can support this work at patreon.com/pointoflearningpodcast. I’m Peter Horn, and I’ll be back at you just as soon as I can with another episode all about what and how and why we learn! 

[51:52]

PETER: We’re speaking today almost halfway through April, which T.S. Eliot famously described as “the cruelest month.” You say that’s because swimsuit season is coming up!

BRITT: Yeah, it’s actually one of the busiest times of year for a dietitian. That is when most people start to decide they need to get healthy and shed their winter weight. I really hope that instead people this year just take a breath and are kinder to themselves and are more body-positive and say like, “Yeah, this is who I am. And this is me healthy.” And just try to get more in touch with eating when you’re hungry and try to eat what you feel, instead of being on a very strict diet and see how it works for you. Or, get a registered dietitian to help you. Even better!

Civil Discourse 101 Transcript (032)

TIM LEAR: Hi, this is Tim Lear, Director of College Counseling at the Pingry School, and you are at the Point of Learning with my friend for over 25 years now, Peter Horn. I know Pete has been facilitating hard conversations with adults as well as students for the past two decades, so when Pingry needed some help with civil discourse and dialogue, Pete was the person I called to lead workshops with faculty and students that he customized for us. I’m pleased that some of our students in the Politics Club turned Pete’s session with them after the January 6 Insurrection into an episode for their own podcast. They gave him permission to use it, so that’s pretty much what you’re about to hear as a special bonus episode of Point of Learning. I mention this in case Pete tries to take all the production credit, like he usually does! But seriously, I think this podcast about what and how and why we learn is so valuable that I became one of the first people to support it when Point of Learning joined Patreon last November. You can join me as a member for as little as $3 a month. Wait a minute. Pete, why am I paying $20 a month? Oh I remember: because it’s just that good. If you’re listening now, you probably know that already. If you haven’t joined yet, hit pause, visit patreon.com/pointoflearningpodcast, and choose the membership tier that's right for you. It only takes a minute. Thanks, and enjoy the show! 

[VOICEOVER]: On today’s show ... this guy!

PETER HORN: Thinking about civil discourse as truth-seeking. In other words, it’s not thinking about it as a debate, not thinking about it as an exercise in winning, which is one of the reasons that I think it requires practice. It involves inviting somebody else in that you trust to say, “Help me think about this difficult topic,” you know, whatever it is. “I want to explore it. I’ve got some ideas about it, but I’m also going to run the risk of changing my mind.”

[VO]: And a group of smart, curious high school students posing thoughtful questions about the hows and whys of civil discourse.

STUDENT: My question pertains to facilitating discussion within a group setting where there are obvious political divisions, however extreme or not …

[VO]: That’s right. One of my favorite topics, charged with one of my favorite sources of insight: students.

STUDENT: I think it’s unfortunate that facts for politicians specifically have become not exactly factual. So I think it’s easy to become wary of when politics becomes so deeply rooted in like, you know, statistics, for example, and when a person that may not exactly be qualified is talking about them. But if they do their homework, it’s incredibly impressive.

STUDENT: If we’re talking to people in a group setting, for example, or even on social media, because we see a lot of arguments on Twitter now. So in these kinds of indirect interactions or spheres where there are other people present, how do we effectively converse—I’m reluctant to use the word debate because I don’t think it’s a debate kind of format, but how do we converse, or arrive at a compromise?

[VO]: All that, and much more on this special bonus episode of Point of Learning!

[03:53]

[VO]: This bonus episode of Point of Learning is a departure from the usual format of me interviewing someone else. As Tim laid out a minute ago, what you’re about to hear is pretty much what took place in an after-school meeting of the Politics Club of the Pingry School in New Jersey. When I showed up for the session via Zoom, club president Marcus Brotman asked if it was okay to record the meeting for the Pingry Politics Podcast (available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and I’m sure some others). Well of course he had me at “podcast”! I’m pleased to be able to share it with you, not just because it’s about one of my favorite topics, civil discourse, by which I mean respectful discussion (or speech, or writing) focused on shared concerns. Cultivating civil discourse as a critical capacity of citizenship that schools all too often ignore completely is a through-line of my career as an educator. But I’m also stoked to share this because—despite that I’m featured prominently—the entire show is really an expression of student voice, another through-line of my career. Students invited me to this meeting; it’s their questions that drive the flow of the show; and of course, what you’re about to hear is a student-produced podcast—full credits at the end. This meeting took place in January, just a few days after the January 6th siege of the Capitol. Marcus sent me a list of questions in advance to shape my introductory remarks, like how I got into consulting, what I believe are key problems in the ways we talk to one another, what solutions I recommend, how to talk with people who believe in a different set of facts, how social media figures into the mix, and so on. I hope it goes without saying that I was thoroughly impressed with this group of teenage citizens—but I’m also gratified that the episode they’re allowing me to share can give you some sense of the work I most like to do when I’m not making podcasts. I can’t let you listen in on a leadership coaching session, and you certainly don’t want to hear me compose a survey or analyze interview data. Plus, there’s almost nothing I enjoy more than talking with and listening to young people. The sound quality will be a little different from other episodes of Point of Learning, thanks to Zoom audio, but I do think you’ll dig it! And so, without further ado, today’s host, Pingry Politics Club President Marcus Brotman!

MARCUS BROTMAN [voiceover]: What’s up? I’m Marcus Brotman and you’re listening to the Pingry Politics Podcast. On today’s episode, we talk with Dr. Peter Horn of HornEd Consulting. Dr. Horn is a fellow podcaster with his podcast, Point of Learning. There, he tries to deal with how and why we learn, and hopes to improve the learning experience for kids and adults alike. Following the Capitol building attack, it is important more now than ever to be able to talk with those you disagree with in a cordial manner, whether those be friends or loved ones. We talked with Dr. Horn today about trying to find methods or strategies to engage with others civilly and in a meaningful way.

[07:17]

MARCUS: Welcome everyone. We’re really happy to have Dr. Peter Horn on the podcast with us, or really just to have a discussion. Mr. Horn, if you’d want to introduce yourself …

PETER: Absolutely. It’s such a pleasure to be with you. What I wanted to do for the format of this meeting— It’s such an honor to be with you, first of all, so thank you for inviting me. I want it to be as interactive as possible. I will make sure that I indicate the content of these [PowerPoint presentation] slides. I think based on your excellent questions, Marcus, that’s kind of given me ideas to get my wheels turning, just to get started here. And I thought, especially as people are coming in, I might just give a few thoughts as a kind of overview of some things that might be relevant, given the kinds of things that you’re interested in thinking about civil discourse, and framing it as truth-seeking. And I’d like to do this maybe for 10 or 15 minutes, but I really want the session to be as interactive as possible. I just wanted to relate some of the things that I thought would be relevant, based on your questions, as a way to begin. I hope everybody’s got their [Zoom] chat window up. I’ve got a way that I can see it here, so please feel free to use that at any point. If we find it useful to do a breakout later, we really would just want to make sure that we’re talking about the kinds of things that are of great interest to you. This is absolutely of great interest to me! I was just hearing a little bit about what you do, and I’d maybe like to hear a little bit more in a few minutes about the format of how you usually do a Politics Club session where you say, “We’re going to talk about this particular topic,” because this is really how I got interested in this as a teacher, which I’ll mention in just a moment a little bit more. But thinking about civil discourse as truth-seeking. In other words, it’s not thinking about it as a debate, not thinking about it as an exercise in winning, which is one of the reasons that I think it requires practice. It involves inviting somebody else in that you trust to say, “Help me think about this difficult topic,” you know, whatever it is. “I want to explore it. I’ve got some ideas about it, but I’m also going to run the risk of changing my mind.” So imagine, for example, turning to the guy behind you in line at Panera, who’s trying to figure out what he wants to order. And you say, “Hey, while you’re figuring that out, do you think capital punishment should be abolished because it’s racist and arbitrary and makes mistakes?” You know, the conversation would not go well because it’s missing some of the things that you need in order to do actual civil discourse. How I got into [consulting] was after 18 years as a school teacher and a school leader right down the road from you guys in Westfield at Westfield [NJ] High School. Are you guys familiar with Westfield? I loved it, but I always was interested in trying to think about new ways to approach teaching and learning, and how to leverage some of the things that I’d figured out to work with other groups besides just my own students, besides just my own colleagues. And so about five years ago, I got into education consulting and research. I’d always be happy to talk with you more about that, but I wanted you to see that there's a website, there's a link [HornEdConsulting.org]. You can always reach out to me through the website, or I just wanted to share this [email address] with you as well, HornEdConsulting@gmail.com, if you want to drop me a line about something, so that this is not just a one-off conversation. If something occurs to you later, if I could be of assistance with you for some other topic that you’re taking up, please don’t hesitate to reach out. The thing I miss most about not being in a school every day is having the chance to work with students. And y’all are my favorite age group by far. I was always working at the high school level, so I would love it! What I started to do in my first few years, I always found myself gravitating toward the kinds of topics in class that might be interesting, but especially when the national climate changed—I’m saying after September 11th, 2001 in particular—I just had a sense that there were students who were really interested in talking about issues and listening to other people’s viewpoints about issues that they didn’t necessarily know how to make sense of … the world, in some ways, because that was a pretty dramatic event. So if you can see at the bottom, this is a poster that came out after I left. This is a group that I started in 2002, in the winter of 2002, for students to come and have a space after school to hear what other people had to say. And not to frame it as a debate, but rather like, what are you thinking of? So this is a poster for an event a couple of years after I left, you may remember the confirmation of Justice Kavanaugh that was a tremendous, you know, controversial issue. So this was a poster related to making space for people to be able to talk about that. This is again from the group that I began in 2002 under a different name, but it's called Agora right now, which is after that Greek word for a “common place,” almost like a marketplace where people could come together to talk. So in addition to my work as an English teacher, this was something I always felt that was important to be able to make a space for students and all members of the community as well. It wasn’t just for students. We would have often have almost as many faculty as students, you know, 30 or 40 people coming, again but in a spirit of, listening. You weren’t standing up and giving speeches. You were saying, “You know, this is what I think about this. This is what I wonder about this. Here are my questions going forward.” As you guys know, probably better than anyone, there aren’t lots of great spaces to do this. All right, so I just thought it was a good idea to begin with a pop quiz, so I want to ask you—I’m just kidding about that! That’s not necessarily a great way to endear people—but what is the root of politics?

STUDENT ANSWER: [The Greek word] polis, like a people group?

PETER: Exactly. Like such as you might find in a city, like that’s really the root, like a city-state is the polis. So you have like Indianapolis, Minneapolis. That Greek suffix on there, that Greek root at the end of it means “city.” And in Greece, like in Athenian democracy, that’s how you talk about somebody who was interested in the concerns of other people. Politās, that’s how they would describe it. So that’s politās with a long ā. That’s how they would talk about, “I’m interested in the concerns of the city, which is to say the concerns of the larger group, not just myself,” that’s how Greeks would talk about those people. “I'm politās.” If you only cared about yourself, you know what you were? That’s right. It’s an idiot. So these two words up here, the word “idiot” that we use casually in a lot of different senses to have a lot of different meanings. It’s changed over the years, but the root sense of it was you’re only concerned with yourself. So like your idiosyncrasy is something that just you do, your idiolect is the way that you speak. And of course your ideology is the way that you look at the world, make sense of the world, the logic of the world that you yourself impart to it—that has that same root. But if you’re just concerned with yourself, you are technically an idiot. So, you know, and again: not that name-calling is going to be a way to begin anything. It's just that I find that interesting, because “politics” of course gets a dirty name. You know, people talk about “playing politics” and so forth. I love that you, many of you, who would go to the [Politics] Club would associate yourself with this term because I think it needs some rebranding in this moment. I think politics can be wonderful. It can be about saying, “You know what? These are shared issues of common concern.” So I wanted to lay that out. For those of you who may not know, Marcus sent me a list of questions and perhaps he talked with you, did a little bit of crowdsourcing on that. The things that he asked were some of the challenges that we face. And again, I’m just going to be presenting for a few more minutes here on some of the ideas that those questions stirred up in me, and then I really want to hear what you have to say about that or other things that you’d like to throw in. But one of the things that are important to remember, one of the challenges that you’ll always find: Jonathan Swift, the Irish author and clergyman from about 300 years ago, he had this line that I have up on the slide. “Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired.” A more up-to-the-moment way to paraphrase that is that you can’t reason people out of opinions that they didn’t reason themselves into. In other words, there are some conversations that you cannot have, because either the timing isn’t right—like you’re in line at Panera and that’s just not what you’re supposed to be doing right there—or just because it feels emotionally true to them and that’s what they’re going to hold on to. And it’s not something that anybody could disabuse them of. I think it’s an important thing to keep in mind, because it’s important to remember that we all have these things: We all have some opinions, some judgments that are—you know, we kind of believe that we are scientists, always kind of looking at the data and reasoning to the right conclusion. But if you listen to my conversation with Jonathan Haidt, you recognize that part of the way that we’re wired is to come up with a viewpoint and then afterwards, go look for evidence, go look for those websites, articles, people who will support that point of view, and that kind of reinforces that cycle. Sometimes we didn’t get there by thinking, and so just by thinking, we can’t come out of it. So it’s important to recognize that civil discourse is a specialized kind of situation; it’s not for everything. I think another important thing to recognize when you’re trying to have these conversations, is that all points of view—I mean, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to say that every single point of view—some people have some, you know, some really horrible points of view—but the political orientations, you know, we tend to counterpose liberals and conservatives, for example. I think it can be very helpful to remember that these are really orientations, you know, ways of looking at the world, and that everybody brings something to the table. So, for example, one of the easiest ways to distinguish between liberals and conservatives would be like, “What is your attitude about change?” And liberals are sometimes—again, if you overlap them with progressives, there tends to be an openness to change. There tends to be a willingness toward an orientation that says, “Let’s try something new, let’s reform something.” Whereas conservatives, just in the route of conserve, the orientation technically tends to be, you know, “Let’s not make change just for change’s sake: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I’m going to be a little bit more hesitant toward that.” We need both kinds of those orientations in order, especially, to think about something difficult. So I think that’s one of the most important things—in your club, in your classroom, on your team, wherever you happen to be practicing civil discourse—if you get yourself into a conversation, is to recognize that these different orientations really bring something different to the table and something important. It’s very important to have those different perspectives. Ideological diversity, or viewpoint diversity, is one of the very important types of diversity that we don’t often talk about, but it’ an important one. Another thing is to recognize, as Jonathan Haidt jokes, it’s really easy for us to see that other people have biases and prejudices, but we don’t tend to recognize our own biases and prejudices. And that’s very important to do. You know, we tend to have different standards. If there’s an idea that we like, if there’s a website that we like, maybe we can say like, “Can I believe this?” Okay. Whereas if it’s something that we don’t like, we often ask ourselves a different version of this question and say, “Must I believe it?” [Based on the work of social psychologist Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn’t So: That Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life.] If it’s a different point of view, we all of a sudden have a different kind of [standard]. And I think it’s important to recognize that this is the way humans are wired. Another dimension is that there’s a real social aspect. We’re much better at staying with our group, with our tribe, with our team. As human beings it’s reasonable to assume that we evolved from people who were good at staying in the group, or else, you know, we wouldn’t be here now! So you, you know, loners and so forth, people who didn’t depend on a sense of relatedness, a sense of belonging, did not do as well in a harsh environment, and so that’s part of the way that we tend to be wired. So even if some members of my group do some really awful things, sometimes I can still cling to that group affiliation because it’s better than being off the team. Okay? I think this is one of the things that is very important in this particular moment, in the news right this very week [12 January 2021], right? Since last Wednesday [6 January 2021] with social media companies objecting to—and this is not a slam on President Trump. You know, demonstrable falsehoods have been part of his rhetoric, and this is not news and that part is not debatable. But what the role of social media companies is in terms of saying, “Well, maybe we should regulate this more,” and when they’re changing [their approach] and what might change with different oversight in the Senate, for example: these things are coming to the fore because it’s so difficult nowadays to get decent information. And I’m not just going to do a commercial for my podcast, although I’d love to have you guys check out Point of Learning with Peter Horn at any point that you want! But the episode a couple before the Jonathan Haidt episode, I talked with an education historian named Jonathan Zimmerman, and he laid out this this line: “I never thought the question of ‘What is a fact?’ would become the most important question in our political culture, but it absolutely has” become the most important question in our political culture. Some of you probably know that line of the late senator in New York, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan who said, “Everybody is entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts.” Part of the problem with our discourse right now, part of the problem with the proliferation of internet sources, is that there doesn’t seem to be in some conversations, a standard-bearer. And so that’s one of the things, of course, that you have to establish. If you’re going to talk about something, you have to be able to agree to “These sources are going to be reliable for us to be able to have this conversation. We both agree that this is okay, or we agree that we’re going to challenge them along the same lines.” Toward this end, I would direct you to allsides.com. This is something that might be interesting for you to check out as an independent organization that was founded by somebody with a very progressive history and somebody with a very conservative history who came together and said, “How can we get better at talking about media and media sources?” And so this website allsides.com might be useful as a tool for you, either in conversations or in classes or in your own research, just to be able to try and begin to rate and evaluate [sources]. It’s an interesting website because the main thing it does is take up particular topics and then present different kinds of coverage on that topic. But without a shared starting point, you know, without a shared reality that you and the other people you’re trying to discuss it with, or you and that other person can discuss it with, you cannot have a productive conversation. So anyway, I really don’t want to talk at a clip any longer than that. These were the [concepts] that Marcus’s questions stirred up in me. And so I wanted to lay those out as kind of a starting place for us. And I wanted to see if either in the [Zoom] chat or speaking out, you’d like to follow up on any of that. Is there anything that you’d like other elaboration on, or are there any other kinds of challenges that you’re facing that you’d like to discuss?

[24:18]

STUDENT 1: Recently—maybe this isn’t recently, maybe this has been going on much longer than I think—but politicians have delved much more into determining like, what is factual and what is not factual, now it feels like, and I was wondering, do you think that politicians exactly have that obligation to disseminate what is true and what is not true? Like, do you think that that’s a dangerous game to play, because I mean, they could lie? So do you think that that’s their role, in your mind, at least?

PETER: You’re talking about like people discussing a particular issue? They might go on like a Sunday morning show, or like when they’re debating in the House or something and say like, “This is factual … or not”?

STUDENT 1: Yeah. Like someone’s speeches, for example, will talk about something that arguably they aren’t exactly qualified to talk about. Like, for example, talking about climate change, when their knowledge of it may be rather slim, I’m just wondering do you—and then they go on to say something like, “That’s a fact,” do you think that that’s exactly their place to do that?

PETER: Well, you know, my feeling about politicians is that part of the nature of the job, you know, another thing that that root polis leads to is policy, right? And if you’re a Congressperson, you’re not just going to be making choices about that little area of policy that you might have a specific background in. You know, somebody might come as an educator, and so maybe they do have a kind of on-the-ground understanding of educational issues, but they’re also going to be asked to talk about defense, if this is at the national level, right? They’re also gonna be asked to talk about the environment. And so they do have an obligation, I believe, to find out, to learn, to do their homework and to become as educated as possible. For me as a citizen, I’m always more impressed when people do have sources and footnotes and things that I can check on their website, if they’re laying out a policy proposal. Remember the joke about, you know—it wasn’t a hilarious joke, but the quip about Elizabeth Warren, “I’ve got a plan for that,” and you would go to Elizabeth Warren’s website and she had very detailed plans that were footnoted with sources. Like “these are the sources that I’m going to, in order to back up these things.” I would much prefer that people are honest about what they know and what they don’t know, sure. But that’s—you know, it could be a little bit of a political gamble, but I do think that there is an obligation to show your work and to say where you’re coming from. Does that—

STUDENT 1: Absolutely. That answers my question. Yeah. I absolutely agree. And I think it’s unfortunate that facts for politicians specifically have become not exactly factual. So I think it’s easy to become wary of when politics becomes so deeply rooted in like, you know, statistics, for example, and when a person that may not exactly be qualified is talking about them. But if they do their homework, it’s incredibly impressive. I mean, your Elizabeth Warren example, like going to her webpage and seeing it be very detailed is an impressive thing. Yeah, I’d agree.

[27:20]

STUDENT 2: I had a question. First, I guess I just want to thank you for taking the time to talk to us today.

PETER: My pleasure. Thank you.

STUDENT 2: And so my question is about like, given the nature of today’s political climate, which is very polarized and people tend to be very sort of entrenched in their ideals. You had this slide about how you can’t use reasoning to sort of change someone’s opinion when their opinion was not really created by reasoning. Could you elaborate, or explain like, like what are the first steps we should take to sort of prophylactically prevent people from being super entrenched in these ideas early on, or is there anything we can do after the fact to actually change their mind?

PETER: Yeah, I think it’s a great [question]. And I was just trying to set up a reasonable expectation to let people know, just to be aware that there are some things you’re not going to be able to convince some people of. Right. But if you get to that point—and there was a question in some of the preliminary conversations that Mr. Lear and I were talking about, you know, I think we all have this: I think we all have family members, like people, if we don’t love them, we’re supposed to at least! But people we are close to who have very different ideas about the world. And so I would say if you get into that situation to try to use that relationship, whatever relationship it is, that you have to try to turn down the temperature and make sure it’s clear in whatever way that you can signal or say explicitly like, “Look, man, this isn't a contest. I’m not trying to prove you wrong. I really want to understand where you’re coming from. I hear you say X, and to me, I’m just thinking like, ‘How could somebody look at this question this way? Or how could somebody vote for this person?’ But I respect you, and I really want to understand where you’re coming from. How can you help me understand how you’re looking at this?” You know, I think that kind of general attitude and orientation is always going to be better than the kind of thing that sets it up as some kind of combat and makes it us vs. them. That’s the reason I changed that title of the Jonathan Haidt episode to “Us + Them,” because it’s so often us vs. them. It’s not a contest and to go back to Sean’s point about facts, right? That can also be a less combative way to get at it. Just say like, “Where did you read that?” Or “Where did you hear that?” “What sources are you using?” It’s just basically as a place to begin—but again, the tone is very important. Not like [angrily], “Where’d you hear that?” That’s part of the reason I used that flippant Panera example at the beginning, to say you have to be in a space where you can take a few minutes, and you have to be in a place where you’re also sensitive to the social dimensions where you especially, if you’re comfortable talking about politics—right? Because this is something that a lot of people shy away from. One reason is that they’ve seen it done so badly in so many places, right? A decent political conversation makes pretty bad television, because usually a political conversation [on TV] is where somebody’s saying things they already believe. And it could be like arguing back and forth, whatever—that’s going to make decent television. If somebody throws a chair or whatever, you know, that’s ratings for you. However, stopping, pausing, thinking about something, changing your mind—that's terrible TV! So we don’t have a lot of examples of how this can be done well. And so if you are known to be somebody who reads the newspaper or whatever, who thinks about these things a lot, somebody could be pretty shy in engaging with you about it. So you must figure out a way to make them more at ease [so they know] that you’re not going to demoralize them, and also be aware of the social dimensions of it, that you’re not going to do it in front of a friend group where it’s just going to make them feel stupid, or less adequate, you know what I mean? Does that, does that help in terms of an approach?

STUDENT 2: Yeah. Thank you. That’s definitely a really good approach to it. I think that that makes a lot of sense, that like understanding where they’re coming from is like the foundation of it, and making sure they don’t feel like attacked or anything.

PETER: And I think it’s important to recognize, as well that people—you know, I don’t think this is [only] an adolescent thing. You’ll see adults doing this too, but especially, with your peers, sometimes people will try out ideas. I’ve got a nephew who’s just a few years older than you guys. He's all libertarian all the time now. Like, he's trying it out. And it’s not that he’s been super interested in politics for a long time, but there’s some things that are kind of appealing to him. And so, you know, I’m just listening and trying to hear where he’s coming from and what appeals to him about that. Because sometimes people do just try out an idea, you know, and I think we should be able to do that. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. The danger is when you become so entrenched, and just decide that everybody else must be wrong. I see somebody else.

[32:30]

STUDENT 3: Hi. Yeah, thank you for coming here.

PETER: Sure!

STUDENT 3: My question is kind of almost responding to one of your points you made just now. If we’re talking to people in a group setting, for example, or even on social media, because we see a lot of arguments on Twitter now—you know, something that reminded me of this is like AOC and Ted Cruz, I believe, got into a fight on Twitter a few days ago. So in these kinds of indirect interactions, or spheres where there are other people present, how do we effectively converse—I’m reluctant to use the word debate because I don’t think it’s a debate kind of format, but how do we converse, or compromise?

PETER: It’s a great question. What I would say to that is that yeah, pretty much Twitter forces you into a debate. You know, if you see civil discourse on Twitter, please screenshot it and send it to me right away, because it’s just like, exactly for that public dimension, it’s not set up to do that. You know, it's set up for virtue-signaling, you know, to say like, “Look how woke I am,” you know, or “Look how tough I am,” or whatever the virtue is, right? It’s set up for that and to do it necessarily in front of a group. Even if you just “at” somebody [i.e., mention them by their Twitter handle in a way that they’re likely to see it but the rest of Twitter is less likely to], obviously if you’re both friends with somebody else, that somebody else can see it, you know, so there’s an audience there. [Twitter] is just not set up to do that. And so what I would say is if you find yourself in that situation where you really would like to engage with somebody, say, “You know, I would like to do it, but this is not the forum for it,” and then, depending on how you know that person and how you’re comfortable doing it—you know, emails, anything would be better than pinging at each other in crafted comments for public consumption where people aren’t replying and it’s just like people are keeping score. That’s a nice example of the opposite of what we want. Does that answer your question?

STUDENT 3: Yeah, yeah. Thank you very much.

PETER: Sure. Yes, please.

[34:30]

STUDENT 4: Yeah, I just want to say thank you again. My question kind of pertains to facilitating discussion within a group setting where there are obvious political divisions, however extreme or not. And how do you go about facilitating that kind of discussion when you know that people will feel personally attacked, or how do you go about preventing it? Because what I’ve noticed is that a lot of people in these kinds of settings start to feel unsafe, just [as a result of] someone’s opinion. So how do you go about either navigating that or just trying to prevent it?

PETER: Facilitating discussion is one of the hardest things to do, you know, and that I’m talking about like facilitating a discussion about a non-controversial topic, you know, just facilitating a good conversation about a song, for example. Well, people could feel some kind of way about [a song], but I’m just saying like, [facilitating a discussion] is difficult in itself. And then if you add a controversial dimension to it, you’ve just got levels of difficulty. So God bless you for trying, if you’re doing this yourself! I would say the key thing is the ground rules that you lay out, that you make very clear … to make sure that everybody’s there at the outset. I’m raising this because if you’re talking about our Zoom world where unfortunately we currently are now and have people coming in a little bit later in that sort of setting, you’ve really got to have everybody there at the outset and then lay out some ground rules. So for example, a very good one to begin with is to say, “Look, the spirit of this is exploring this idea. This is not a contest.” You know, to lay that out, like, why are you coming together? You want to hear other people’s views. And that implicitly, explicitly, every person in this circle has dignity, and that dignity cannot be impugned. So that means no side conversations, right? Like whispering or chatting [on Zoom] or whatever. Obviously, no ad hominem attacks. You’re attacking ideas, you’re questioning ideas, you’re critiquing ideas, raising questions about ideas—not about the people who hold those ideas. So that it’s less personal. No personal attacks or no ad hominem attacks, no generalizations about a particular group of people, because nobody likes to feel like if they’re part of that group that they have to answer for everybody, and usually, you know, there are not too many responsible things that you can say about entire groups either. So to have some things at the outset that you’re saying. Also maybe something like “What’s said in this room stays in this room,” or “What's said in this space, stays in this space” just because it’s so easy to misconstrue stuff. If somebody is like, “She said what?!” if it’s reported afterwards. So I would think carefully about those. And I’d be happy to talk with you about those. I mean, those are some of the ones that I’ve used whether it’s in one of these discussions or running a Gay-Straight Alliance meeting, or whatever it might happen to be, that have been helpful. And I’d be happy to talk more about that. But I also think also in the group, a great way to start is to say, “So these are some [ground rules] to begin. Does anybody else have one that they’d like to add?” You know, just so you feel like you’ve got some ownership in that, does that help?

STUDENT 4: That helps a lot. Thank you.

PETER: I see somebody raised a hand up there.

[38:01]

STUDENT 5: Yeah, that’s me. First, thank you for coming to us, like everybody said. And my question is do you think there’s any red flags when having difficult conversations, and then what are they and how do we recognize them? And then how do we tactfully deal with them and potentially get out of the conversation?

PETER: That’s a good question. So if one of those norms has been violated, for example, right? You know, if you agree to say, “This is the way we’re going to engage with each other, and this is the way we are going to agree to engage with this topic.” And then all of a sudden somebody starts trash-talking and throwing shade at another person, then, okay, so that would be a red flag—that a norm has been violated. And just say like, “This isn’t what we're doing here. What we’re doing is hard. That’s not it.” Okay. Well another thing is body language. And obviously this is much easier to do in a room, when you’re in this space, as opposed to on Zoom, especially if you can’t see people’s faces [i.e., Zoom video for participants is off], right? I would never recommend that for this kind of thing, you at least want to be able to see other people’s faces. But the body language will you know if the other people are feeling comfortable or not, you know if you get a lot of this [gesture = arms crossed], if you got a lot of leaning back. If you’re attentive, if you’re facilitating that conversation, that can be a sign for you. It’s not necessarily a red flag; it might be a yellow flag, depending on what the body language is. But I think that’s a very important thing to pay attention to, because it can mean people are shutting down, or it can mean people are feeling, like it’s not going to go well. Does that help?

STUDENT 5: Yeah, thank you.

PETER: Sure!

[39:33]

STUDENT 1: I guess my question is that oftentimes, and this is, I guess, a pretty personal experience, is when Marcus and I are leading discussions for the club, you know, somebody might say something that is factually untrue—not like it’s an opinion I disagree with, but it’s just demonstrably false—but you don’t want to shut the person down right away and be like, “Well, you just made a false statement, so you can’t talk now.” And that’s obviously not good either, but I was wondering, what are your opinions on regulating factual information in a setting that, you know, very much requires it?

PETER: Yeah, it’s a wonderful point. One of the things that I would do is first of all, you could set it as a norm. You could say, “Be prepared to defend any claims, or any facts that you lay out,” right? You could set it up at the outset to say like, just because people could be getting [information] from different places. The other thing that you could do is decide to harness [conversation] to a text or a couple of texts. In other words, you could have two excerpts of opinion pieces, or two excerpts of news pieces, whatever, on a particular topic, or even just one if you wanted to. It really depends on what you want to do. But to say like, “We’re going to deal with the reasoning involved in here, what they lay out here. We’re going to accept this as what’s going on.” That can help, and I usually advise that. It may not work as well for your purpose. But I will say when we were talking about like the [United Nations] Oil for Food scandal or something like that, doing a topic that people might not have top of mind awareness of, often it was helpful to just kind of root it in a text to say where it came from, or a couple of texts. But just say, “We’re going to stay within the boundaries of this as an exercise and see how well it goes.” I mean, that’s something I would do if you find itself going off the rails a lot of times. If it’s just untenable, that’s a kind of conversational harness that you could use.

STUDENT 1: Thank you. I appreciate it.

[41:36]

STUDENT 6: I think something that comes up a lot in these discussions that we’ve been having is that the people who need to hear this aren’t here. How do you encourage people to join the discussion and to engage with it when they’re faced with a large majority which disagrees with them?

PETER: One thing is to rely on your relationship. If there’s somebody that you know. That’s always a personal thing to get somebody, the relationship that you have with somebody, to trade on that and say, “Hey, I think it would be really be interesting to you.” And that’s one of the things that you could do in the Politics Club. For example, if you have a core group who generally attend meetings, you can ask, “Next session, everybody brings somebody else, one other person,” so that everybody has the charge to bring somebody else here.” Right. You can do that. I think that’s one of the ways to do it, because people do respond to personal invitations, especially ones that feel sincere. So if you just notice about this poster [on slide, an ad for WHS discussion group Agora], one of the things that are built into this— and again, I didn’t design this poster—but it’s a technique that we used to use: to build in the questions, like, “Are you concerned, frustrated or angry over the recent Supreme Court nomination process?” Because of course, the title Making Sense of Politics in America is super broad. So at least to say, here are some kinds of dimensions of this that we might discuss. And if you target those questions towards some of the people who might feel a certain way, but may look at an issue differently from the way that you do and you know that, then you could maybe draw them in, in terms of the way that you advertise, in terms of the way that you market it to people. Does that make sense?

STUDENT 6: Yeah. No, thank you. I think the personal connection is really important to make people feel comfortable in a situation where they normally wouldn’t be.

PETER: Yeah. And if you do that, you know, make sure you check in with them afterwards, if you invite your friends, just say like, “How was that for you? What was that like?” Again, it’ll give you useful information and also—because not everybody wears their reactions on their sleeve. Usually there’s some kind of signal about body language, but you’re not necessarily always paying attention. So to check in with them afterwards can be very helpful too.

STUDENT 6: Gotcha. Yeah. Thank you.

PETER: Yessir.

[44:00]

STUDENT 7: I had a question about the slide you just had on [i.e., the WHS Agora discussion group ad], whether these spaces for civil discourse actually attracted people that were Democrat, Republican, and Independent, because when I was doing research for colleges, I would look at what clubs they had. And sometimes there would be these clubs that would say, “Oh this is for civil discourse where everyone can come.” And then when you go on the website, sometimes the speakers that I would see, and like the way they would say “for everyone and especially the Republican Party,” it would kind of attract students that didn’t feel like they fit into the mold and then they would all come up. And then, you know, it was intimidating, I guess, and almost kind of turned me off and I, that’s probably part of me not wanting to engage in that kind of discussion and being scared of it too. So I was just wondering, you know, specifically in educational spaces, how to legitimately draw in everyone.

PETER: Yeah, absolutely. And college, you know, college is a little different. It’s a little bit different from high school, but I think some of the same principles apply. To answer the first part of your question, we really did. We really did get, you know, people from a range of perspectives, but that’s after we’d done it for a while and the word got out that that really was what we were doing and encouraging. You know, so for example, I think I mentioned that [our open discussion group] started at 2002 shortly after the United States went into Afghanistan. And you know, the first name of the group that we had was the Peace Discussion Group, because the first kids who came and said, “I’m really concerned about this,” or “I feel some kind of way.” Like that was the angle that they were concerned about. But then because we called it the Peace Discussion Group, there was this perception that we would just be holding hands and singing, you know, like everybody’s going to feel a certain way, as opposed to some people who might feel like military intervention is justified. So [those people might assume that] “I’m not welcome at this meeting.” So that was actually part of the way that the reason that we changed to a more neutral name, like Agora, which maybe nobody knows what it means anyway so it’s very neutral! It’s kind of a blank slate as an abstract term—but we wanted to be clear about that. You know, who we were and what we were about. But that took a little while, and you’re absolutely right that some campus groups, some groups in high schools will say that they are for political discussion and say that they welcome all points of view, but there are the “right” points of view, there are the sanctioned points of view, there are the ordained points of view. And it’s a little bit like being in a teacher’s class where you have a “discussion,” but you pretty much are sure what the “right” answer is. You know what I mean? Right? So that does happen. It takes effort to protect that space and for people to believe, “Okay, you know, I’m not going to be judged for asking this question or putting this out there,” but that’s something that even when we had a reputation, we reinforced those messages explicitly every time: “This is what we’re about. This is not about grandstanding. This is not about proving how right you are and how much you’ve read or how smart you are. That’s not what this is about. This is about exploring this issue that we’ve come here to hear other people’s opinions about. Or even if we don’t speak, just to listen to,” because that was what I think could be a valuable process too: if you have the experience of thinking about some of these things where other people don’t, sometimes you can be a model, you know? Sometimes you look to other people to model how do you approach thinking about this? What kinds of things are involved when you decide something is right or wrong, or worthwhile or not? What are the things that you’re taking into account? And I think we all need models in terms of moral reasoning, logical reasoning—things where there isn’t just a cut and dried answer for how do you approach thinking about some of these things? So that’s another thing that you can do that I think is just so much more useful when it’s transparent, as opposed to, you know, just this debate and everybody’s coming with their minds made up and like, you know, that’s what it is. That’s all it is. Does that help?

STUDENT 7: Yeah.

PETER: Did you have another one?

[48:01]

STUDENT 4: Yeah. Just going off of this point, how do you just deal with spaces where a lot of times, especially recently when handling conversations around social reform, I’ve noticed that it’s always one group who feels pressured to speak and another group who feels pressured to respond, whether that be in a way of support or whether that be in a way of opposition, how do you just break down the barrier of one group has to speak for the rest or one group has to introduce the opinion that will just set the norm for the conversation? If I’ll speak personally, when it comes to issues of Black people, I feel like I have to say something to set a tone about like, “Obviously I won’t like if someone brings up this point or this point,” but I also don’t want to do that because I feel like that will silence other people who want to disagree but don’t want to attack me personally. So how do you deal with those kinds of situations?

PETER: Thank you for speaking and being candid about your experience. You know, that burden of representation, you know, if you’re the only woman in a group, or you’re the only person of color—the burden of representation, of feeling like you have to speak on behalf of the group, that’s not fair to anybody, right? And so I think that can be explicitly one of the things that you say, to lay out that nobody’s going to speak on—you know, just as we’re not going to make a generalization about an entire group, no one should be expected to speak on behalf of an entire group. That’s just not fair to do, so to lay that out as an expectation at the outset. You’re absolutely right. It’s a difficult dynamic. And when it’s not said, when it’s not explicit, that’s where I think it gets weirder. Again, it’s not something that you necessarily lay out on the first day of French I, for example, but if you take up these issues, if you take up these kinds of conversations in class, very soon it should be made explicit that, that’s not cool to do for anybody. But I think it’s important to be explicit about that as a norm. Does that make sense? Does that help?

STUDENT 4: Yes. Definitely.

[50:13]

STUDENT 8: I was wondering … There’s a lot of pressure to stick with facts and logic in political conversations and like make sure everything is backed up with statistics. But I do think there are certain topics where emotions tend to actually play a significant role a lot of times, like human rights and hate speech and hate crimes, especially. And I guess I’m asking your opinion of whether emotions really have any place in political discussions and emotionally charged topics.

PETER: Oh, that’s a great question. I mean, I believe they animate all of politics, you know, emotions. And a lot of activism is rooted in anger, for example, you know, frustration, you know, like real righteous indignation, saying like, “The world should not be this way!” So that’s what motivates you to go and organize and put on or to get together with a march. So emotion does affect a lot of things. I think that part of the difficulty that can happen sometimes—and I think we can’t pretend that we’re not emotional beings who have these feelings about especially issues of right and wrong, those really animate us. Why would you take time after school to come and talk about something if you didn’t care about it at all—just because you want to make yourself look that good on the resume that you’re going to turn into [Director of College Counseling] Mr. Lear for your college? That’s not what it’s about, right? Or it shouldn’t be. It’s because you care. But the next level of that, right?—at some point, if you are going to try to persuade somebody of something, then I think then the argument and the logic—and it’s not necessarily just, you know, “facts,” but it’s an argument that feels reasonable to other people. Then I think you have to figure out some way to put that together. So I can tell you passionately that [Ben & Jerry’s] Chunky Monkey is the best flavor of ice cream. (I’m right about that, of course!) But I won’t necessarily be able to persuade you of that, because that really is a matter of taste, right? And you’re going to have other opinions, people who may be lactose intolerant, you know, it might not fit for you. So I’m going to have to resign myself to say, I believe Chunky Monkey is the best. I know it for myself to be the best, but there are some things I will not be able to persuade in an argumentative fashion and convince other people. And that’s okay. And I also think it’s important, though—and maybe this is related, and I don’t want to kind of dismiss this and say like, “There’s this [emotional] tier, and then there’s this [logical] tier.” Sometimes it can be very useful to say, “This is my experience about this particular topic.” To set up a conversation where that’s what you do. There’s an exercise [developed by Peggy McIntosh] called Serial Testimony where you’re speaking from your own experience about a particular topic. It’s not about right or wrong. It’s not about debate, but in order to put the voices out there, especially the voices of those who don’t feel maybe that they have a command of the facts. To set up a meeting and say, “For the first 20 minutes, we’re going to do this: Everybody talks for one minute.” There’s going to be a timer, right? (Because some people will say “one minute” and then they’ll go longer.) And I can send you guys, if you’re interested, a one-page handout on how to do this. But it’s really cool. There’s no debate about it. There’s no agreement or disagreement. There’s no referring to what he, she, or they said earlier, it’s just, you go around and hear different people’s viewpoints on a topic. And that can be a wonderful exercise, especially when something’s raw. You know, if you have a terrible situation, a really hard situation and you haven’t done the research about it. You just feel, you know, whatever. To be able to have a space that you can come into where it’s not set up like a logical debate, it’s not even set up like the truth-seeking free-for-all [of civil discourse], but it’s set up as a place that we’re going to hear from other people today because something awful just happened or something really poignant just happened. That can be a really helpful exercise, especially when something’s new. And especially when something’s really hard, because it’s another kind of conversational harness that you put on there where the obligation isn’t necessarily to back up everything that you say, to come in as if you thought through everything—that can be useful. So that’s called Serial Testimony, and I’d be happy to share that with you, not as something you do every time—you know, because there’s space for all kinds of conversations, but that can be helpful, you know, especially if you want to draw people into meetings where they just don’t feel competent arguing about politics. Because they don’t get politics, because politics is too complicated. It seems complicated because it is complicated, you know? And some people have grown up hearing political conversations at the dinner table and some people never have, because there were other conversations or no conversation, you know? So that’s an alternative. It’s a great point to bring up.

STUDENT 9: Yeah, so there’s been this trend at Pingry that I’ve noticed amongst my peers and my friends that many are scared to speak up or even discuss politics. It’s like this taboo, because I mean, as you mentioned, politics is complicated. It’s also scary at the same time. And as a result, many people become like apolitical. They’re like, “Oh I’m not gonna talk about politics. I don’t like politics.” Or if they do enter a political discussion, they restrain themselves. Maybe even self-censor to an extreme. And ultimately, that’s kind of a bad thing in that there’s no discourse about vital issues that are affecting our society. And people just keeping things, keeping their ideas to themselves. There’s no discourse. So how do we remove this barrier of entry to politics in a way, like lower that threshold and maybe not make it so personally involved and like lower the stakes in a way, I guess, and make it so people aren’t as scared to just discuss politics and make it so it’s not so taboo as it is right now?

PETER: That has to do with the tone that you set. And so in a classroom, you know, it’s your teachers usually who are setting that tone and you participate in it, and it can be done well, or it can be done, you know, really not in a helpful way so you kind of feel scared. I know that some of your teachers do have concerns that, especially because they have an impression that if you’ve got kids, for example, who tend to be more liberal or progressive, more Democratic-leaning, maybe that kids who don’t agree with that might be more hesitant because of the social dimension, and might be hesitant to speak. It’s very important to set the tone, to establish it. And you can do it much more easily in a club that you control, to say like, “That’s not what we’re about. You know, there’s not a right answer here, we’re here because we recognize that this can be challenging and we’re going to figure that out.” But it comes down ultimately to the questions of the relationship, the respect, the trust that you’re able to have with that other person—where you take out those painful social dimensions, those difficult social dimensions, where you can feel like you’re getting judged because you don’t know what to say, and you really have the sense that you’re engaging with somebody who is taking your ideas seriously and seeing you as a full person endowed with inalienable dignity.

MARCUS: Thank you for coming on. It’s been really great getting to talk to you and it’d also be cool to see what are your thoughts on the Politics Club and how we run things here, but that’s for another day.

PETER: This was a blast. I’d be happy to come back and talk about that and hear from you about it. And I just want to thank you all for your interest. It’s really cool to see people who are passionate and wanting to think about this. It’s one of the things that we have to get better at. We have to get better at, as a country, talking with people we disagree with, and figuring out how to do that respectfully. Keep up the great work and please be in touch!

[58:23]

PETER [voiceover]: That’s it for today’s special bonus edition of Point of Learning, brought to you by the Pingry Politics Podcast, which is hosted and edited by Marcus Brotman. The co-host is Sean Lyons, with intro and outro music by Max Brotman. The advisor to the Pingry Politics Club is Dr. Zachary Wakefield. My great thanks to Tim Lear for connecting me with all of them and the thoughtful young citizens whose questions and ideas you heard on today’s show. On the show page, I’ve got images of most of the civil discourse slides I used during my presentation to the club, as well as a link to the handout I mentioned on Serial Testimony, a conversational harness that was developed by Dr. Peggy McIntosh and pioneered by her colleagues at the National SEED Project. Check out the Point of Learning episode menu for more about Peggy McIntosh and the good folks at SEED! Thanks as always to Shayfer James for Point of Learning intro, outro, and, on this episode, supplemental music. A proud member of the Lyceum consortium for educational podcasts, Point of Learning is produced by me here in Sunny Buffalo, New York. I’m Peter Horn and I’ll be back at you in just a few weeks with Registered Dietitian Britt Schuman-Humbert, star of the sensational YouTube cooking series RD Unfiltered! See you then!

Coronavirus Crystals Transcript (031)

EDWARD SNELL: Hello! I’m Dr. Edward Snell, President and CEO of Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute in Buffalo, New York, and you are at the Point of Learning with my friend Dr. Peter Horn. For over 60 years, the Hauptman-Woodward Institute has worked to find cures for diseases like COVID-19, cancer, and others that impact us today. Our renowned researchers study proteins in normal and diseased states, and what they learn provides a foundation for developing medicines, therapies, and cures. One of our scientists, Dr. Sarah Bowman, has devoted much of the past year to studying the structures of proteins within SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. Today she’ll be talking with Pete, who has helped support our education programs here at HWI. I look forward to their conversation, and I hope you enjoy the show! 

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today’s show …

SARAH BOWMAN: I will say it’s an incredible time to be a scientist.

[VO]: Dr. Sarah Bowman on the critical importance of basic science, now and for the future ...

SARAH: All you have to do is look at what’s been happening over the past few decades, right? Where we have things like SARS, MERS, Zika, Ebola—and those last two are not coronaviruses, but they are infectious agents that cause severe disease, and now of course, with SARS-CoV-2 causing COVID-19. These are things that are going to continue to happen. And so anything we can do to gather information to help us understand the basic biology, the basic structures, how these things work, how we can stop them is absolutely important.

SARAH: I hope that in some ways that our experience in the pandemic culturally, worldwide, helps us to really recognize the role of science and the role of structural biology in helping deal with these types of things.

SARAH: You know, frankly, and I don’t mean to be alarmist, but we can anticipate other kinds of things happening. And so that is something that I think we should all, you know, be thinking about. “Okay. So what have we learned from this? And how do we move forward with that information?”

[VO]: All that and much more coming right up on this episode of Point of Learning. Stick around!

[3:02]

[VO]: Dr. Sarah EJ Bowman earned her PhD in Chemistry at the University of Rochester, and then worked as a postdoctoral fellow at MIT, as well as Los Alamos National Laboratory. For the last year, she has focused on SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Dr. Bowman is Director of the High-Throughput Crystallization Screening Center and Associate Research Scientist at the Hauptman-Woodward Institute (a.k.a. HWI) here in Buffalo, where I was fortunate enough to get to know her a little bit in recent years as I helped to support the Institute’s education programs. Since the outbreak of COVID-19 in the U.S., Sarah’s lab has been studying key components that make up the novel coronavirus. At the Crystallization Center, a facility that over the past 21 years has supported over one thousand labs around the world, crucial non-infectious elements of the virus are coaxed into crystals that can help researchers see the otherwise invisible structure of the virus. Knowing what these extremely small viral parts look like helps researchers understand how new or existing existing drugs might be effective in fighting the virus.

PETER: Sarah, thanks so much for sitting down today. I do have some idea about how busy you are!

SARAH: Thanks for having me.

PETER: Before we get into what you’ve been up to lately, and because this is a show about what and how and why we learn, I wanted to begin by noting that you did not wander around as a seven-year-old with pipettes and beakers, rocking a lab coat, dreaming that one day you’d be helping to cure disease. In fact, you have said that you didn’t like science as a kid, or at least in high school. What changed for you, and how?

SARAH: Well that’s a great question. I actually got my first undergraduate degree in English Literature and Women’s Studies. I didn’t take any science or math classes at all in my first round of college. And I was working at a bookstore, a small independent bookstore in Denver, Colorado, the Tattered Cover. And I had a number of people who I was training—I was in personnel, in the human resources department—who were in college, taking science classes. I was like, “These people seem a lot more interested in science—it seems a lot more interesting than anything I encountered when I was, you know, trying to memorize things,” which I’m horrible at. And so I think one of the things that happens is that—and maybe it’s not as bad anymore—but the high school educational system in science really becomes about memorizing a bunch of facts, and you really lose a lot of the wonder and amazingness of science, where you get to try to discover things and learn new things. It’s a constant joy to just do science. And I think that does a big disservice to a lot of students who maybe, like me, aren’t good at memorizing things, and instead just would love to learn things that are really interesting. And so I went back to school and I got a second undergraduate degree in chemistry.

PETER: So it was your friends’ enthusiasm for what they were thinking about, but really—but you went for chemistry?

SARAH: That’s good question! So I went back to school and I took a couple of classes. I took a general biology class, and a basic math—it might’ve been like trigonometry. I can’t even remember it, maybe algebra, and then chemistry. And it turned out that I had this absolutely fantastic chemistry instructor, who I’m still in touch with. And instead of being a bunch of memorization, which biology still was (in that class), it was just amazing, and I completely fell in love with it. And I said, “Wow, well, what else can you do with chemistry?” And I found myself on the path to finding myself with a second bachelor’s degree.

PETER: So it sounds like you certainly had an instructor that you connected with, and that’s huge. But do you remember—was there, I mean, was there a moment—I’m just thinking about this because to me, you know, I found a lot of chemistry more abstract, say, than biology or physics. I mean, was it an experiment, was it a property of something? Was it, you know, was there a flash at any point—literal or metaphorical?

SARAH: I think that it was a series of recognizing—like an understanding of how molecules are actually made, and what different things are made up of, and understanding the periodic table and how electrons are organized. And then from there, kind of going into biochemistry and physical chemistry, and really delving into all of these just amazing things. You know, experiments?—probably not. Just really a kind of a gathering of information that just fit in my head in terms of how the world works. And I had a lot of really great instructors. I was actually at Metropolitan State College of Denver, which is a university in the middle of Denver, and they do a lot of teaching. They have some tremendous professors there.

PETER: Well, it sounds like you answered a question that I was going to ask, which was—you know, because it sounds like you didn’t click with science so much in high school, or even in college the first time through—is there something that you’d recommend about changing or making sure is included in the teaching of science that wasn’t included in your experience of science? But it sounds like, as opposed to leaning heavy on memorization, which sometimes happens, to lean more into the wonder and the marvel of the natural world, and allow kids to experience that in some way.

SARAH: Right, and you know, it can be broken down into different areas for different age groups and things like that, where instead of memorizing a whole list of different things, you ask a question like, you know, simple things: Why is the sky blue? Why—you know, why, why … I can’t think of anything!

PETER: Well, I mean, Friend of HWI Alan Alda, from the Center for Communicating Science [at Stony Brook University], he has this famous Flame Challenge that began with this story of asking, “Well, how does fire work?” or “How does a flame work?” Like what’s the science behind that?—which of course is not actually, you know, an easy matter.

SARAH: It’s not an easy matter, but when you start talking to kids about that stuff—kids, adults—that actually doesn’t matter. I think that a lot of people get scared about science and go, “Oh gosh, that’s way too tough! Wow, you do some really hard things!” And it’s like, actually, I think there’s ways you can talk about the different things that are happening to help people. And I can say that often as scientists, that’s not something we’re trained to do, right? It’s not part of the natural training to learn how to talk to non-scientists about what we do—

PETER: What you need is more podcasts, and then you can practice!

SARAH: And then there’s practicing. Yes. Yeah. Okay, so we’ll do like one a month!

PETER: Don’t threaten me with a good time, Dr. Bowman! I’m right here. I don’t know that this is the definition of thinking like a scientist, but I remember this, reading Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark [Penguin Random House, 1995] which I think was mid-1990s, but it seems kind of prescient, talking about the danger of pseudo-science and things that pass themselves off [as science]. But at one point he talks about the disposition of scientists, or of great scientists, as having these things in common: one is a real sense of wonder, you know, this appreciation for the marvels and the mysteries of the natural world, but then also that’s tempered with—or in dialogue with—a real skepticism, asking questions about how that works and why that works. So I wanted to put this question to you before we get into some of your own work. You mentioned that you have this background in English—brava!—and Women’s Studies, so you were immersed in some disciplines that were, you know, pretty different in terms of the approach to subject matter, usually, the way that they’re engaged and taught, before you had this very increasingly extensive and intensive science training, and then experience as a practicing scientist. Is there anything to the idea of “thinking as a scientist,” as opposed to—because you’ve done it in different ways. You went through a certain part of your life as a pretty avowed non-scientist. Do you think there’s a way that you approach scientific problems differently? Is there a kind of discipline to it? Is there a rigor to it that’s different? Not that we don’t think rigorously over in English or, you know, in social sciences or other cross-disciplinary areas—but is there anything to that, or is that just one of those things people say?

SARAH: Again, it’s a really good question. I have to agree with the characterization of, you know, you have a sense of wonder and a sense of skepticism combined when you’re doing science, and in part that’s because you have ideas about how something should be working or how it might work. And so you come up with experiments to test that, and then you run the experiment. And many, many times what you discover is that it’s nothing like what you thought. And so you have to go back to the drawing board and go, “Okay, I have to reevaluate with this new information that I’ve gained from my experiment.” That’s kind of just a basic science approach to things. And I think it’s one of the things that is hard for people to think about in terms of scientists, because we’re supposed to be expert, to know what we’re talking about all the time, and a huge part of our discipline is that, okay, well, we know what we’re talking about, and then we’re going to test it. And then we’re going to figure out where we were wrong about those things. In terms of “Are the disciplines themselves very different?” … so, I’ll tell you a small story. When I was finishing my English literature degree, I had an opportunity to go to graduate school for English literature to continue studying this 18th-century novelist that I had been studying in college. So my first presentation at a conference was actually in English literature when I was an undergrad.

PETER: All right!

SARAH: So I thought about it and I was like, you know, the thing that would be really horrible about that for me is that—I read a lot and it’s very important to me—is that I didn’t want to have to just keep reading and essentially being very analytical and tearing apart the language and the reading, and so on and so forth. And so that’s where I decided, “Okay, I’m going to go work at a bookstore and figure out my life for a little bit,” which I did. And in reality, in science, it’s very similar. You are very analytical, you tear things apart—

PETER: You end up tearing up viruses!

SARAH: And in that case, for me it’s great because that’s getting at the details of how things work and how things are put together and how biology works and how the virus works with regards to the human host and things like that. So I found myself not wanting to do that in English literature and thrilled to be doing that in science. And so I’m not sure how different it really is once you’re at a research level. It’s just about would you find that fulfilling work to be engaged in, and you know, for science, for me, it is. For English, it would not have been, you know?

PETER: Yeah, I just found myself thinking as you were speaking about the number of musicians who are very fine musicians who have decided not to go into music professionally, because they love it so much and they don’t want to depend on it, you know, for their bread and butter.

SARAH: Right, and you don’t want to, you know, I guess, ruin it in some way.

PETER: Yeah, I understand. I think that’s a nice comparison. Because of course it’s dangerous—I think it’s just downright fallacious to think that there’s a different kind of, or you know, a higher level— There’s just maybe a slightly different critical capacity that somebody who’s a scholar of literature takes to texts and words and language, you know, because there is some analysis that goes along with that.

SARAH: Right.  

[18:35]

PETER: To shift back to what you’ve been working on lately, which is SARS-CoV-2, I’ll first clarify, as you’ve clarified to me, that you’re not a medical doctor; you’re not a virologist per se. Rather you study—and help others to study—the underlying structures of proteins and other molecules that compose cells and viruses in this case, as well as the pharmaceutical drugs that interact with them. That’s fair to say?

SARAH: Yeah, I would say so.

PETER: I’m going to link in the show page for this episode to the recent feature in the Buffalo News about the work that you and your lab are doing. It’s attracted a great deal of well-deserved attention—but you should know this, including prompting some people who know I have done some work with Hauptman-Woodward to ask me what exactly your process is. So I have been proud to say that I’d be able to double check my story with you soon, but I wonder if I can make the unconventional interview move of telling you how I understand your process, based on conversations with you and tours of your lab from the “Before Times” [i.e., pre-pandemic] and asking you to stop me and gently disabuse me of my misunderstandings. I hope this won’t be come off as mansplaining so much as “laymansplaining,” which I don’t know is any better! You game?

SARAH: We can try that.

PETER: All right, professor, self-induced pop quiz for me! First, the virus itself that causes COVID-19 is called SARS-CoV-2—

SARAH: That’s correct!

PETER: And that’s named because it’s very similar to the virus that causes SARS, the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome that had a global outbreak in 2003, as many of us remember.

SARAH: Yes.

PETER: CoV is short for coronavirus, which refers to the shape now very familiar to many of us, a scary little sphere covered in spikes. When I say “little,” I mean that if you could get these microscopic Death Stars to line up, it would take about 600 of them to match the width of a human hair.

SARAH: That’s right.

PETER: Not the length, which of course varies (especially with lockdown hairstyles)—but the width of one hair. Okay, and it’s those spikes on the SARS-CoV-2 virus that attach to a specific protein in our lungs, heart, and other organs, which allows the virus to hijack our body’s own biochemistry and begin replicating, spreading disease within us.

SARAH: So what happens is that the spike is able to interact with receptors in the human cells. And so you’re correct there. And that then enables—

PETER: You don’t say “hijack”?

SARAH: Oh no, you can say “hijack.” “Hijack” is fine. It hijacks. But the way it hijacks is by inserting itself then into the human cell. And so it inserts into the human cell and essentially starts opening up, releasing its RNA into the human cell. This might be too detailed, sorry!

PETER: This is ribonucleic acid.

SARAH: And then and then it’s essentially—

PETER: —like genetic material.

SARAH: It’s the genetic material, but it’s really primed— So the human host machinery, then—our cells—as soon as the thing is in us, will just start pumping out all the proteins that it needs to make copies of itself and send it out to more of your cells. And so it’s not that it’s not hijacking. It grabs onto that receptor that helps it pull itself into the cell and then it really hijacks the cellular machinery inside the human cell.

PETER: So you’ve been working on some non-infectious parts, right?

SARAH: Right.

PETER: So as small as the virus is, you’ve been working on some of the even smaller proteins that compose the virus.

SARAH: Right.

PETER: Again, this isn’t the infectious part—that’s happy. But these are critical to understanding how that virus works and the damage that it does.

SARAH: Right.

PETER: And so this is the part that you and your team do is to figure out how to get those proteins that make up the virus to form crystals.

SARAH: Right.

PETER: Which are a little like salt crystals, but much smaller. Right? They’re like the repeated structure of that same protein, but in this stable, regular form.

SARAH: Right.

PETER: And they’re regular enough that if you shoot an x-ray through them (or get some friends in Chicago who can do that for you), I guess—

SARAH: Right.

PETER: —then you get what are called diffraction patterns.

[23:38]

[VO]: SIDEBAR. Let’s break this concept down. Diffraction, etymologically a “breaking apart,” is a phenomenon involving a change in direction that can happen with any kind of wave—sound waves, water waves, light waves—that pass through an opening or around a barrier in their path. If you’ve watched river water flowing around big rock, or if you’ve been able to hear someone calling to you from behind a tree, you’ve experienced diffraction. Diffraction patterns are probably easiest to understand with visible light like certain lasers, because they’re, you know, visible. Also, lasers are a single-point light source, similar to a single sunbeam, if you can imagine that. Linked to the show page for this episode is a short YouTube video for physics teachers that demonstrates a diffraction pattern nicely. In the video, there’s a green laser pointer fixed onto an apparatus that holds the laser pointer in place. A foot or so away is a thin wire, also fixed onto an apparatus, vertically—the wire is straight up and down. Behind that is a large white screen of paper. When the laser is focused on the wire, what shows up on the paper screen is not what most of us would intuitively expect. For instance, I’d expect to see a vertical shadow from the wire. Instead, what shows up is evidence of interference patterns from light waves bending around the wire. What shows up on the screen is not a vertical shadow, but a dotted horizontal line: a diffraction pattern mapping where the shape of the waves coming around one side of the wire match the shape of the waves coming around the other side of the wire. This is called constructive interference, and results in the projected dots. Where the light waves don't match up, it’s called destructive interference, and the resulting image—or non-image—is the breaks in the dotted line. If you know the math, you can move backwards from this pattern to calculate the width of the wire.

PETER: And making the crystals is important, so—again, it took me a little bit to grasp this. So making the crystals is important because it repeats that protein many times over, because you wouldn’t get enough information, or it would be just too small, I guess, if you tried to shoot an x-ray at just one protein, if you could even find it, right? But if you have lots of them, then you get a big enough diffraction pattern or enough data to be able to do this next step.

SARAH: I’d say that’s correct. That’s accurate.

PETER: So, and this—I don’t think you do this part, right? [HWI colleagues in Chicago] study the diffraction patterns that are produced and they use math based on the understanding of like, how x-rays would interact with various materials.

SARAH: Right.

PETER: And then they kind of back-map from those patterns; using the math, they back-map it and say, “Okay, well, this is what this would look like, or probably looks like in 3D.”

SARAH: Right. So you can think about it like this. You get a diffraction pattern, and then you can use the mathematics, for instance, some of the equations that Herb Hauptman actually developed—

[VO]: Dr. Herbert A. Hauptman was the mathematician who shared the 1985 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work applying mathematical methods to determine the molecular structure of complicated crystals, as Dr. Bowman is relating. Hauptman began working at Hauptman-Woodward in 1970, well before the Institute was renamed in his honor, and remained for 41 years, until his death at age 94. A decade later, he is still as much loved for his humanity as revered for his mind.

SARAH: —some of those equations, and then some others, because proteins are a little bit bigger and so have to have to be handled a little differently, and what you get out of kind of working with the data and the math is an electron density map. And then when you have this electron density map, you can build a model into that map, okay? And so that’s a little bit more of a scientific spin on it. And so what we do at the Crystallization Center, you’re right, is mostly the crystallization step. But in my work, I also send the crystals to a synchrotron, which is a big x-ray source, and then I take the data and actually work with it as well.

PETER: Oh you do. Okay. So you do some of that back-mapping that I was talking about, right?

SARAH: Yeah, exactly. Not for everything that comes into the Crystallization Center, but for my science projects.

PETER: Yeah, you’ve got lots and lots samples you’ve been working with. Now the samples of CoV-2 that you’ve been working with, they’ve been national—all across the country. Any international samples?

SARAH: For the SARS-CoV-2, we pretty much been working with samples from the U.S. We do more than just SARS-CoV-2 proteins, and we do have other international people sending samples for those as well.

PETER: My understanding is that there are about 500 coronaviruses that have been identified already, out of potentially 5000 that scientists believe likely exist. Is it reasonable to believe that the underlying structures of all coronaviruses are similar enough that the work that’s already been done will be a step forward in the unhappy circumstance of a future epidemic or pandemic caused by one of these more-novel coronaviruses?

SARAH: I think that any time we can do continued science work on these types of things, it’s really important and critical. So one of the reasons that we have been able to move so quickly—I know it doesn’t feel “quickly” for anybody who’s still in lockdown and not going out to eat and stuff like that, right?—but it’s been an incredibly quick process to get vaccines and therapeutics moved forward. And part of that is because of the research, some of the basic research on some of the basic structures that were done on the original SARS, as well as the MERS coronavirus. And those are two of the (now) three coronaviruses that are highly infectious and transmissible and deadly for humans. So there’s another four known coronaviruses that infect humans, but they just kind of cause common cold symptoms. And so the basic research is incredibly important. And I think one of the key things to come out of what’s happening right now is that we really do need to have funding and support for doing this type of work, even when we’re not in a pandemic, because it’s—I mean, all you have to do is look at what’s been happening over the past few decades, right? Where we have things like SARS, MERS, Zika, Ebola—and those last two are not coronaviruses, but they are infectious agents that cause severe disease, and now of course, with SARS-CoV-2 causing COVID-19. These are things that are going to continue happen. And so anything we can do to gather information to help us understand the basic biology, the basic structures, how these things work, how we can stop them is absolutely important. You know, they are none of them so similar to each other that we can go, “Oh, great. We know exactly how to treat this once something arises.” And that’s coming out, even just with the SARS-CoV-2, we know a tremendous amount about this virus now: we know how it transfers. We know what a lot of the proteins look like. We know some drugs that might actually stop it from replicating once it infects a cell, once it infects a human. But you know, we’ve now got a couple of mutations that are coming up that may impact the ability of the various vaccines to actually stop it from causing an infection. So, you know, I think the basic science is absolutely critical and I hope that in some ways that our experience in the pandemic culturally, worldwide, helps us to really recognize the role of science and the role of structural biology in helping deal with these types of things. So yeah, that’s my soapbox!

PETER: I think it’s an important one to stand up on. And I just wanted to reiterate that when you say “basic science,” you’re talking about like the structural biology, in this case.

SARAH: Yeah. I collaborate now, in part because of the pandemic, I’m collaborating with a virologist who studies—she studies coronaviruses. And so you know, when people aren’t interested in it, then funding goes down and it becomes very hard to study these things. And so when I say basic science, I’m talking about definitely the structural biology, because that’s the basic science that I’m engaged in, but also how do viruses get transmitted? … the basic biology behind how do the aerosol droplets actually contain the virus? What’s the humidity required to actually let the viruses live? Because these are all things that would help in a future pandemic, which— You know, frankly, and I don’t mean to be alarmist, but we can anticipate other kinds of things happening. And so that is something that I think we should all, you know, be thinking about. “Okay. So what have we learned from this? And how do we move forward with that information?”

[35:27]

PETER: A couple questions about the culture of science. There has been unprecedented international focus and cooperation on COVID-19. What’s it like to be working in science at this time, by which I mean, how do you think about the pros and possible cons of redirecting so much energy toward one problem?

SARAH: Well, you know, I will say it’s an incredible time to be a scientist! You know, we are confronting something that is a major threat that everybody recognizes as a major threat—that maybe most everybody recognizes as a major threat. And so I think that there’s a real value placement culturally worldwide on scientists and what scientists are doing. To be in the community of scientists who are working together and collaborating and putting their work out, sometimes without everything being published yet and making sure that structures are available and results are available, is just incredible. So it’s really enabled, I think, an increase in open access and open science, which I think ultimately benefits science—because, you know, science can be a little competitive! And so, we’re in a period where instead of the competitiveness, there’s a lot of collegiality and helpfulness and working together. You know, obviously a lot of funding has been shifted and a lot of people’s projects— You know, I didn’t work on anything, I think, anything viral-related until around this time last year. And so it does shift things and it has shifted things, I think, for a lot of people. I don’t think that that’s necessarily a bad thing. You sometimes start working on things because you have discovered it and you find it very interesting and you want to continue to work on it.

PETER: But that might be a nice example, which is to say, like the stuff you were working on before. It wasn’t viruses, but it wasn’t unimportant, right?

SARAH: Right.

PETER: You weren’t just doing it for fun. And so you’ve had to kind of table that for a year. You know, I don’t know. I’m just interested in thinking about like the possible downside of things that may have been neglected.

SARAH: No, I think it’s gonna, so—

PETER: We don’t know yet.

SARAH: We don’t know yet. Well, here are some things that we do know. I can say that there was a period where the only samples we were running were samples for SARS-CoV-2, and that was fine because pretty much everybody was kind of closed down. So graduate students and postdocs and scientists weren’t in their labs generating samples. So there was a tremendous stopping of a lot of stuff. And I think that people are getting back into their labs and have staggered schedules [for safety, to minimize personnel on site] and things like that. But when I talked to my colleagues who have graduate students and they packed up computers and sent them home to, you know, have their lockdown. And at that point, your science is completely interrupted. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to the scientific community and to early-stage investigators who are really, you know—you only have a few years to get results and get funding and things like that before you have to move on, typically. And so it’s a stressful time, I think, for a lot of scientists.

PETER: Finally—thank you. I mean, I just wanted to say on behalf of somebody who’s part of a larger community benefiting from the work that you all are doing. You know I have some sense of how hard you in particular and your colleagues at HWI are working. It is not unappreciated. Finally, I wanted to ask about women in science. I know that have highlighted several of the outstanding female scientists, such as Professor Kara Bren at the University of Rochester and Professor Catherine Drennan at MIT, in whose labs you’ve worked, and who mentored you, to some extent.

SARAH: No, they definitely mentored me!

PETER: They definitely mentored you. I also know that one of my favorite facts about the high school program in bioinformatics at HWI led by Dr. William Duax is that the participants are usually 50/50, kids who identify as male and female. This reflects HWI itself, where women are well represented on the science staff—pretty much 50%— but still I believe worldwide, only about 30% of science researchers are women. Do you see the balance of this traditionally male-dominated field improving quickly enough, or is there something in particular you think would be helpful to see change?

SARAH: Is it changing fast enough? Of course not. You know, there’s definitely a leaky pipeline. This is for women. This is for underrepresented minorities. This is for people who identify in different ways. It’s a hard path to choose to be on. And it is, I think can be made harder by not having people around you who, you know, have had your similar experiences, right? And so what can be done? A lot. And some things are being d one by a lot of people. So here are some examples. We’ve had a somewhat lively discussion and I felt—this was before the pandemic actually happened—about, you know, well, what happens when you have a conference and you have a session and it’s all, you know, white men who are speaking? Okay. So what, how, wait, how does that even happen? And you know, there’s people who can be kind of—how do we say?—maybe defensive about that and who say, “Well, these are the top people in the field, and these are the people who are really well known.” And so I think, you know, one of the things that many people are trying to do is say, “Okay, great. We’re gonna make sure that we have as diverse a group of people speaking as we possibly can.” And, you know, I run a workshop—I’ve run it for the past three years—at Stanford Synchrotron Light Source. And every year we essentially bring in speakers, and last year it was virtual, which actually enabled a larger international participation. So that was great, but we always try to have obviously various gender parity, as well as early-stage investigators, people who work at government labs, people who work in industry, people who are at major research institutes, people are primarily undergraduate institutes, at various career stages doing a variety of different types of experiments. And what it’s actually done is generate this really engaged and interactive group that I think maybe otherwise wouldn’t have come together and started talking in the ways that it has over the past few years. And so there are things that can be done that don’t take tremendous effort, but they do take some effort.

PETER: Some thoughtfulness.

SARAH: Some thoughtfulness about how to do it. So I think that the pandemic, by all kinds of reports, is potentially going to be difficult for, you know, women with children, who typically take more of the childcare burden. And so, you know, if you are on a tenure clock and having to produce a certain amount of stuff and your lab’s shut down, you can’t do any work. And you have to care for your kids instead of sending them to school. It can be a tough thing.

PETER: There are staggering stats about the disparity and people who have needed to come out of the workforce in order to take care of kids—almost entirely women.

SARAH: Right. So like I said, it’s a really great time to be a scientist, but it’s also—you know, really, we’re not going to know what the ultimate impact of things is in terms of the pandemic for some time, and I think in some ways that will depend on what kind of various institutional responses are toward the different kind of disparities that occur.

[45:17]

[VO]: That’s a wrap for today’s show! Thanks so much to Dr. Sarah EJ Bowman for taking time to talk about her lifesaving work. Point of Learning has recently joined the Patreon family, where you can show your support for this show about what and how and why we learn—from theatre to leadership, psychology to poetry to structural biology—for as little as a dime a day. Check out the various membership tiers at patreon.com/pointoflearningpodcast. For this episode, Patreon members will be able to view a few more-technical segments that may be of interest on the Patreon Point of Learning page. This episode has its own YouTube companion, replete with supplementary visuals, so be sure to visit and subscribe to the Point of Learning YouTube channel. You can also find links to the transcript and other related materials on the show page for this episode. Thanks as always to Shayfer James for intro and outro music, and thanks too to DJ Sluggy for special music featured throughout this episode. Sluggy is a versatile creator based in the Denver area who was pleased to contribute to this episode showcasing another remarkable woman who discerned her mission in Denver. I am proud to share that once upon a time, Sluggy was my student for 11th- and 12th-grade English. Finally, thanks to you for listening and subscribing, rating and reviewing this show. If you can think of just one person who’ll enjoy this episode as much as you did, please share! It will mean most coming from you. A member of the Lyceum consortium for education podcasts, Point of Learning is written, edited, mixed, and produced in Sunny Buffalo, New York by me. I’m Peter Horn, and I’ll be back at you just as soon as I can with another episode all about what and how and why we learn!

A Graycliff Christmas Carol Transcript (030)

ANNA KAPLAN [bumper]: Hello! I'm Anna Kaplan, Executive Director of Graycliff, and you are at the Point of Learning with my friend Peter Horn. For those of you that are unaware, Graycliff is the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed summer home of Isabelle and Darwin Martin on Lake Erie in Derby, New York. I invited Pete to Graycliff to read selections from the version of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol that his father, the late Reverend Gilbert J. Horn, adapted in the 1960s and read to congregations for over 30 years--including members of First Presbyterian Church in Buffalo. Peter began performing his dad's adaptation in 1996, and I am delighted to welcome you to a new version of this holiday classic, set in this amazing space, and punctuated beautifully by carols performed by members of Buffalo's own Vocalis Chamber Choir. Thanks to Full Circle Studios for shooting the footage of this special event. Full credits and details on how to make a donation to Graycliff, if you enjoyed the production, follow the show. For now, welcome to Graycliff, sit back, and enjoy!

[1:11] Carol: “O Come, All Ye Faithful”

[2:01] STAVE 1—SCROOGE

NARRATOR: Once upon a time—of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve—old Scrooge sat busy in his counting house. It was cold, bleak, biting weather: foggy withal.

NEPHEW: A Merry Christmas, Uncle! God save you!—

NARRATOR: —cried a cheerful voice. It was the voice of Scrooge’s nephew.

SCROOGE: Bah!

NARRATOR: —said Scrooge.

SCROOGE: Humbug!

NEPHEW: Christmas a humbug, Uncle? You don’t mean that, I’m sure!

SCROOGE: I do! Merry Christmas … What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You’re poor enough!

NEPHEW: Come then, Uncle. What right have you to be dismal? What reason have you to be morose? You’re rich enough!

NARRATOR: Scrooge, having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said—

SCROOGE: Bah!

NARRATOR: —again, and followed it up with

SCROOGE: Humbug!

NEPHEW: Don’t be cross, Uncle!

SCROOGE: What else can I be, when I live in a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas … Out upon a merry Christmas! What’s Christmas to you but a time for paying bills without money, for finding yourself a year older but not an hour richer. If I could work my will, every idiot who goes about with “Merry Christmas” on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!

NEPHEW: Uncle!

SCROOGE: Nephew, keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine. Good afternoon!

NEPHEW: I want nothing from you; I ask nothing of you. Why cannot we be friends?

SCROOGE: Good afternoon.

NEPHEW: I am sorry, with all my heart, to find you so resolute. We have never had any quarrel to which I have been a party. But I have made the trial in homage to Christmas, and I’ll keep my Christmas humor to the last. So, a Merry Christmas, Uncle!

SCROOGE: Good afternoon!

NEPHEW: And a Happy New Year!

SCROOGE: GOOD AFTERNOON!!!

NARRATOR: His nephew left the room without an angry word, notwithstanding. He stopped at the outer door to bestow the greetings of the season on the clerk, who, cold as he was, was warmer than Scrooge; for he returned them cordially.

SCROOGE: There’s another fellow, my clerk, with fifteen shillings a week, and a wife, and a family, talking about a merry Christmas—I’ll retire to Bedlam!

NARRATOR: This lunatic, in letting Scrooge’s nephew out, had let two other people in. They were portly gentlemen, pleasant to behold, and now stood, with their hats off, in Scrooge’s office. They had books and papers in their hands, and bowed to him. Referring to his list, one of the gentlemen spoke.

SOLICITOR: Scrooge & Marley’s, I believe. Have I the pleasure of addressing Mr. Scrooge or Mr. Marley?

SCROOGE: Mr. Marley has been dead these seven years. He died seven years ago this very night.

SOLICITOR: We have no doubt his generosity is well represented by his surviving partner—

NARRATOR: —said the gentleman, presenting his credentials. It certainly was; for they had been two kindred spirits. At the ominous word generosity, Scrooge frowned, and shook his head, and handed the credentials back.

SOLICITOR: At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge, it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessities; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.

SCROOGE: Are there no prisons?

SOLICITOR: Plenty of prisons …

SCROOGE: And the union workhouses? Are they still in operation?

SOLICITOR: They are. Still, I wish I could say they were not.

SCROOGE: Oh, I was afraid from what you said at first that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course. I’m very glad to hear it.

SOLICITOR: Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude, a few of us are endeavoring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. What shall I put you down for?

SCROOGE: Nothing!

SOLICITOR: You wish to be anonymous?

SCROOGE: I wish to be left alone! I help to support the establishments I have mentioned—they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.

SOLICITOR: Many can’t go there; and many would rather die!

SCROOGE: If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population! It’s not my business. It’s enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people’s. Mine occupies me constantly. Good afternoon, gentlemen.

[8:12] Carol: Excerpt from “Angels, We Have Heard on High”

[8:41] STAVE 2—MARLEY

NARRATOR: After taking his his usual melancholy dinner at his usual melancholy tavern, Scrooge arrived at his old, gloomy house. With his key in the lock of the door, he was astonished to see in the knocker, without its undergoing any intermediate process of change, not a knocker—but Marley's face!

Marley's face. (It had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar.) It was not angry or ferocious, but looked at Scrooge as Marley used to look—with ghostly spectacles turned up on its ghostly forehead. But as Scrooge looked fixedly at this phenomenon, it was a knocker again. Scrooge turned his key sturdily, walked in, and lighted his candle.

SCROOGE: Humbug!—

NARRATOR: —said Scrooge. But scarcely had he sat down in his chair when a disused bell over his head began to chime loudly, as did every other bell in the house. The bells were succeeded by a clanking noise, deep down below, as if some person were dragging a heavy chain over the casks in the wine-merchant's cellar. The cellar door flew open with a booming sound, and then he heard the noise much louder, on the floors below, then coming up the stairs, then coming straight towards his door.

SCROOGE: It's humbug still! I won't believe it.

NARRATOR: His color changed though, when, without a pause, it came on through the heavy door and passed into the room before his eyes. Marley in his pigtail, usual waistcoat, tights, and boots. The chain he drew was clasped about the middle. It was long, and wound about him like a tail, and it was made (for Scrooge observed it closely) of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses made of steel. His body was transparent, so that Scrooge could see the two buttons on his waistcoat behind. He had often heard it said that Marley had no bowels, but he never believed it till now. 

SCROOGE: How now! What do you want with me?

MARLEY: Much!

SCROOGE: Who are you?

MARLEY: In life, I was your partner, Jacob Marley. 

SCROOGE: Can you—can you sit down?

MARLEY: I can.

SCROOGE: Do it, then.

MARLEY: You don't believe in me.

SCROOGE: I don't.

MARLEY: What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of your senses?

SCROOGE: I don't know.

MARLEY: Why do you doubt your senses?

SCROOGE: Because a little thing upsets them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whoever you are!

NARRATOR: Scrooge was not much in the habit of cracking jokes, nor did he feel, in his heart, by any means waggish then. The truth is that he tried to be smart as a means of distracting his own attention and keeping down his terror.

SCROOGE: Humbug, I tell you. Humbug!

NARRATOR: At this the spirit raised such a frightful cry, and shook its chain with such a dismal and appalling noise, that Scrooge held on tight to his chair to save himself from fainting. But when the phantom took off the bandage around its head and its lower jaw dropped down upon its breast, Scrooge fell upon his knees and clasped his hands before his face.

SCROOGE: Mercy! Dreadful apparition, why do you trouble me?

MARLEY: I have been traveling thus these seven years—no rest, no peace—now knowing that no space of regret can make amends for one life's opportunity misused!

SCROOGE: But you were always a good man of business, Jacob.

MARLEY: Business! Humanity was my business. The common welfare was my business. Charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business! I am here tonight to warn you that you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate.

SCROOGE: You were always a good friend to me. Thank 'e!

MARLEY: You will be haunted by three spirits.

SCROOGE: Is that the chance and hope you mentioned, Jacob?

MARLEY: It is.

SCROOGE: I—I think I'd rather not.

MARLEY: Expect the first tomorrow, when the bell tolls one. 

SCROOGE: Couldn't I take 'em all at once and have it over, Jacob?

MARLEY: Expect the second on the next night at the same hour and the third upon the next; and for your own sake, remember what passed between us. 

NARRATOR: Scrooge looked up, and the specter vanished into a night screaming with phantoms, many like it, many known to him. He tried to say—

SCROOGE: Humb—

NARRATOR: —but stopped at the first syllable. Being much in need of repose, he went straight to bed without undressing, and fell asleep upon the instant.

[15:13] Carol: “Carol of the Bells”

[16:34] STAVE 3—CHRISTMAS PAST

CLOCK: Ding dong!

SCROOGE: A quarter past--

NARRATOR: --said Scrooge, counting.

CLOCK: Ding dong!

SCROOGE: Half past.

CLOCK: Ding dong!

SCROOGE: A quarter to it.

CLOCK: Ding dong!

SCROOGE: The hour itself--and nothing else!

NARRATOR: Light flashed up in the room upon the instant, and the curtains of his bed were drawn, and Scrooge found himself face to face with the unearthly visitor who drew them.

SCROOGE: Are you the spirit, sir, whose coming was foretold to me?

GHOST: I am.

SCROOGE: Who, and what are you?

GHOST: I am the Ghost of Christmas Past.

SCROOGE: Long past?

GHOST: No. Your past. Rise, walk with me!

NARRATOR: The spirit made toward the window.

SCROOGE: I am a mortal, and liable to fall. 

GHOST: Bear but a touch of my hand there, and you shall be upheld in more than this!

NARRATOR: They stopped at a certain warehouse door, and the ghost asked Scrooge if he knew it.

SCROOGE: Know it? I was apprenticed here!

NARRATOR: They went in. At the sight of an old gentleman in a Welsh wig, sitting behind such a high desk that, if had been two inches taller, he must have knocked his head against the ceiling, Scrooge cried in great excitement--

SCROOGE: Why it's old Fezziwig! Bless his heart, it's Fezziwig alive again!

NARRATOR: Old Fezziwig laid down his pen, and looked up at the clock, which pointed to the hour of seven, and called out in a comfortable, oily, rich, fat, jovial voice--

FEZZIWIG: Yo ho, there! Ebenezer! Dick!

NARRATOR: Scrooge's former self came briskly in, accompanied by his fellow apprentice.

SCROOGE: Dick Wilkins to be sure. Bless me, yes. There he is. He was very attached to me, was Dick. Poor Dick! Dear, dear. 

FEZZIWIG: Yo ho, my boys! No more work tonight. Christmas Eve, Dick! Christmas, Ebenezer! Let's have the shutters up before a man can say "Jack Robinson"!

NARRATOR: Shutters up! There was no chore they wouldn't have undertaken with old Fezziwig looking on. The floor was swept and watered, the lamps trimmed, fuel heaped on the fire, and the warehouse was as snug and bright a ballroom as you would desire on a winter's night. When the clock struck eleven, Mr. and Mrs. Fezziwig took their stations, shaking hands with every person individually as he or she went out, and wishing every one a Merry Christmas. During the whole of this time, Scrooge acted like a man out of his wits. His heart and soul were in the scene, and with his former self. It was not until now, with the bright faces turned from them, that he remembered the ghost.

GHOST: A small matter--

NARRATOR: --said the ghost--

GHOST: --to make these silly folks so full of /gratitood/.

SCROOGE: Small! 

NARRATOR: Scrooge was indignant.

GHOST: Why, is it not? He spent but a few pounds of your mortal money. Is that so much that he deserves praise?

SCROOGE: It isn't that, Spirit. He has the power to render us happy or unhappy, to make our service a pleasure or a toil. The happiness he gives is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.

GHOST: What's the matter?

NARRATOR: --asked the ghost.

SCROOGE: Nothing particular.

GHOST: Something, I think.

SCROOGE: No. I should like to be able to say a word or two to my clerk just now. That's all.

NARRATOR: Suddenly, Scrooge was not alone but sat by the side of a fair young girl, who spoke through her tears.

BELLE: It matters little to you, very little. Another idol has displaced me; and if it can cheer and comfort you in time to come, as I would have tried to do, I have no just cause to grieve.

YOUNG SCROOGE: What idol has displaced you?

BELLE: A golden one.

NARRATOR: Scrooge heard himself reply--

YOUNG SCROOGE: This is the even-handed dealing of the world! There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty, and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!

BELLE: You fear the world too much Ebenezer. I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master-passion, Gain, engrosses you. May you be happy in the life you have chosen. Good-bye, Ebenezer.

SCROOGE: Spirit! Show me no more! Conduct me home. Why do you delight to torture me? Leave me. Take me back. Haunt me no longer!

NARRATOR: Scrooge was suddenly conscious of being exhausted and, furthermore, of being back in his own room, and barely had time to reel into bed before he sank into a heavy sleep. 

[22:18] Carol: “Lo, How a Rose, E’er Blooming”

[23:58] STAVE 4—CHRISTMAS PRESENT

NARRATOR: Awaking in the middle of a prodigiously tough [snort] snore, Scrooge had no occasion to be told that the bell was again upon the stroke of one. Now, being prepared for almost anything, he was not by any means prepared for nothing. Five minutes, ten minutes, a quarter of an hour went by, yet nothing came. At last, however, he began to think how curious it was that, at the stroke of one, his bed had been bathed in a blaze of ruddy light, which came from the adjoining room. He got up softly and shuffled in his slippers to the door. The moment Scrooge's hand was upon the lock, a strange voice called him by name, and bade him enter.

GHOST: Come in! Come in, and know me better, man!

NARRATOR: Scrooge entered timidly, and hung his head before the spirit.

GHOST: I am the Ghost of Christmas Present. Look upon me! You have never seen the like of me before. 

SCROOGE: Never.

NARRATOR: The Ghost of Christmas Present rose.

SCROOGE: Spirit, conduct me where you will. I went forth last night on compulsion, and I learnt a lesson which is working now. Tonight, if you have aught to teach me, let me profit by it.

GHOST: Touch my robe!

NARRATOR: Scrooge did as he was told, and held it fast. The spirit led him straight to Scrooge's clerk's, stopping to bless Bob Cratchit's dwelling with the sprinklings of his torch.

It was after dinner, and all the Cratchit family was drawing round the hearth to taste the festive drink which had simmered there all day. Bob served it out with beaming looks. 

CRATCHIT: A Merry Christmas to us all, my dears. God bless us!

NARRATOR: --which all the family re-echoed.

TINY TIM: God bless us, every one!--

NARRATOR: --said Tiny Tim, the last of all. He sat very close to his father's side upon his little stool. Bob held his withered little hand in his, as if he loved the child and wished to keep him by his side, dreading that he might be taken from him. 

SCROOGE: Spirit--

NARRATOR: --said Scrooge, with an interest he had never felt before--

SCROOGE: --tell me if Tiny Tim will live.

GHOST: I see a vacant seat in the poor chimney corner, and a crutch without an owner. If these shadows remain unaltered by the future, the child will die. 

SCROOGE: No, no! Oh no, kind spirit, say he will be spared!

GHOST: If these shadows remain unaltered by the future, none other of my race will find him here. What then? "If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population!"

NARRATOR: Scrooge hung his head to hear his own words quoted by the spirit, and was overcome with penitence and grief.

GHOST: Man--

NARRATOR: --said the Ghost--

GHOST: --if man you be in heart, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered what the surplus is, and where it is. It may be that in the sight of Heaven you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man's child.

NARRATOR: Scrooge bent before the ghost's rebuke, and trembling cast his eyes upon the ground. But he raised them speedily, on hearing his own name. It was Bob Cratchit's voice.

CRATCHIT: Mr. Scrooge! I'll give you Mr. Scrooge, the founder of the feast.

NARRATOR: His wife was livid.

MRS. CRATCHIT: The founder of the feast indeed! I wish I had him here. I'd give him a piece of my mind to feast upon, and I hope he'd have a good appetite for it!

CRATCHIT: My dear, Christmas Day.

MRS. CRATCHIT: I'll drink his health for your sake and the day's, not for his. Long life to him. A merry and very happy Christmas. He'll be very merry and happy, I have no doubt!

NARRATOR: It was a long night, if it were only a night, because the Christmas holidays appeared to be condensed into the space of the time Scrooge and his guide spent together. Turning to the ghost, Scrooge asked--

SCROOGE: Are spirits' lives so short?

GHOST: My life upon this globe is very brief. It ends tonight.

NARRATOR: Scrooge nodded, but still looked quizzically at the spectral form.

SCROOGE: Forgive me if I am not justified in what I ask, but I see something strange and not belonging to you protruding from your skirts.

NARRATOR: From the foldings of its robe, the ghost brought two children: wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet and clung upon the outside of its garment.

GHOST: O man, look here! Look, look down here!

NARRATOR: They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meager, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility.

SCROOGE: Spirit, are they yours?

GHOST: They are humanity's! This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want.

SCROOGE: Have they no refuge or resource?

GHOST: "Are there no prisons?"--

NARRATOR: --said the ghost, turning on Scrooge for the last time with his own words--

GHOST: "Are there no workhouses?"

NARRATOR: The bell struck twelve.

[30:33] Carol: “In the Bleak Midwinter”

[32:14] STAVE 5—CHRISTMAS YET TO COME & CHRISTMAS DAY

NARRATOR: Scrooge looked about him and beheld a solemn phantom, draped and hooded, coming like a mist along the ground towards him. It was shrouded in a deep, black garment, which left nothing of it visible save one outstretched hand. 

SCROOGE: Am I in the presence of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come?

NARRATOR: The spirit answered not, but pointed onward with its hand toward a little knot of business men. Scrooge advanced to listen to their talk. 

FAT MAN: No--

NARRATOR: --said a great fat man with a monstrous chin--

FAT MAN: I don't know much it either way. I only know he's dead.

DEEP-THROAT: When did he die?--

NARRATOR: --inquired another.

FAT MAN: Last night, I believe.

SNUFF-HEAD: Why, what was the matter with him?--

NARRATOR: --asked a third, taking a vast quantity of snuff out of a very large box.

SNUFF-HEAD: I thought [sniff] he'd never die.

FAT MAN: [yawning] God knows--

NARRATOR: --said the first, with a yawn.

COCK-NOSE: What has he done with the money?--

NARRATOR: --asked a red-faced gentlemen with a pendulous excrescence on the end of his nose that shook like the gills of a turkey-cock.

FAT MAN: I haven't heard. Left it to his company perhaps. He hasn't left it to me, that's all I know.

NARRATOR: This pleasantry was received with a general laugh. 

FAT MAN: It's likely to be a very cheap funeral, for upon my life I don't know of anybody to go to it. Suppose we make up a party and volunteer?

COCK-NOSE: I don't mind going if lunch is provided; but I must be fed if I make one!

NARRATOR: Another laugh. Speakers and listeners strolled away and mixed with other groups. Ill at ease, Scrooge turned from this scene to the ghost.

SCROOGE: Specter, tell me what man was that who died?

NARRATOR: The ghost pointed downward to the grave by which it stood. Scrooge crept towards it, trembling as he went; and following the finger, read upon the stone of the neglected grave, his own name, EBENEZER SCROOGE. 

SCROOGE: No, Spirit! Oh no, no! Spirit, I am not the man I was. I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone!

NARRATOR: In agony, Scrooge caught the ghostly hand, and tightly closed his eyes, only to find himself clutching his own bedpost. [Pause.] Yes! And the bedpost was his own. The bed was his own, the room was his own. Best and happiest of all, the time before him was his own, to make amends in!

SCROOGE: I don't know what to do! I'm as light as a feather! I'm as happy as an angel, as merry as a schoolboy, as giddy as a drunken man! A Merry Christmas to everybody! A Happy New Year to all the world!

NARRATOR: Running to the window, he opened it and put out his head. No fog, no mist--clear, bright, jovial, stirring cold, piping for the blood to dance to; golden sunlight, heavenly sky, sweet fresh air, merry bells. Oh, glorious. Glorious.

SCROOGE: What's today?--

NARRATOR: --cried Scrooge, calling downward to a boy in Sunday clothes.

YOUNG BUCK: Today? Why, it's Christmas Day!

SCROOGE: [Realizing] It's Christmas Day! I haven't missed it. The spirits have done it all in one night. Of course they have. They can do anything they like! [To Young Buck:] Hallo, my fine fellow! Do you know the poulterer's in the next street, at the corner?

YOUNG BUCK: I should hope I did!

SCROOGE: An intelligent boy! A remarkable boy! Do you know whether they've sold the prize turkey that was hanging up there? Not the little prize turkey--the big one.

YOUNG BUCK: What, the one as big as me?

SCROOGE: What a delightful boy! Yes, my buck!

YOUNG BUCK: It's hanging there now!

SCROOGE: It is? Go and buy it. Yes, go and buy it. Come back with him in less than five minutes and I'll give you half a crown!

NARRATOR: The boy was off like a shot.

SCROOGE: I'll send it to Bob Cratchit's! He shan't know who sent it. It's twice the size of Tiny Tim!

NARRATOR: It was a turkey! He could never have stood upon his legs, that bird! Scrooge dressed himself all in his best, and got out into the streets. But he was early at the office the next morning. If only he could be there first, and catch Bob Cratchit coming late! That was the very thing he had set his heart upon. The clock struck nine. No Bob. A quarter past. No Bob. He was fully 18 minutes and a half behind his time. Scrooge sat with his door wide open, that he might see him come in. Bob's hat was off before he opened the door; his comforter too. He was on the stool in a jiffy, driving away with his pen as if he were trying to overtake 9 o'clock. 

SCROOGE: Hallo!--

NARRATOR: --growled Scrooge, in his accustomed voice, as near as he could feign it. 

SCROOGE: What do you mean by coming here at this time of day?

CRATCHIT: I am very sorry sir. I am behind my time.

SCROOGE: Now, I'll tell you what, my friend. I am not going to stand this sort of thing any longer. And therefore--

NARRATOR: --he continued, leaping from his stool, and giving Bob such a dig in the waistcoat that he staggered back into the wall--

SCROOGE: --and therefore I am about to raise your salary!

NARRATOR: Bob trembled. He had a momentary idea of knocking Scrooge down, holding him, and calling for a straitjacket.

SCROOGE: A merry Christmas, Bob! A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you in many a year! I'll raise your salary, and endeavor to assist your struggling family. Make up the fires, and buy another coal-scuttle before you dot another i, Bob Cratchit!

NARRATOR: Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more. And to Tiny Tim, who did not die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world. And it was always said of him that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us. And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless us, Every One!

[39:43] Carol: “Joy to the World”

[40:36]

[VOICEOVER]: That's it for today's special holiday edition. My great thanks to Anna Kaplan for inviting me to read at the spectacular Graycliff Estate, and to members of Buffalo's own Vocalis Chamber Choir for appearing as our Graycliff Carolers. They were Mike Alessi, Claudia Brown, Maria Parker, and James Burritt. James is also the founder and director of Vocalis. I know I've urged audio listeners to check out the YouTube version of various shows before, but I'm absolutely insisting on it this time! Our friends at Full Circle Studios shot beautiful footage of the performances and the Frank Lloyd Wright home, which John Opera took into his video darkroom to lend a distinct visual design to each of the shots, as well as the overall production. John and I have been besties for 35 years at this point, but we have never collaborated artistically on this scale, and I'm so grateful for his eye and skill. The video version was produced as a benefit for Graycliff Conservancy, which you can learn more about, and support, by visiting experiencegraycliff.org. You haven't heard Shayfer James directly on this episode, but he's been haunting the audio like a ghost out of Dickens: Tom Makar's remix of Shayfer's Weight of the World appeared at the top of the show under Anna's bumper, and this right here is Michael Rosin's pipe organ treatment of the same tune. Can't sign off of a Dickens recording without thanking my dad, the late Gil Horn, whose reading of this story enchanted all the Decembers of my growing up. If you're interested in the fuller abridged version that he developed, check out podcast episode 008 from three years ago. A proud member of Lyceum, the curated consortium of educational podcasts, Point of Learning is mixed, edited, and produced by me in sunny Buffalo, New York. I'll be back at you soon with Dr. Sarah Bowman, a biologist who has spent most of the year studying the structure of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Until then I wish you light in this dark season, and a far brighter 2021.

Point of Learning Newsletter

Point of Learning Newsletter

Sign up for news about the podcast and other projects.

Subscribe

Loading...

Thank you!

You have successfully joined our subscriber list.